Życie dzielone Karla Dedeciusa (1921–2016)

The article presents the figure of Karl Dedecius (1921–2016) by exploring his activity as a translator and ambassador of Polish – but also Russian – literature and culture in German-speaking countries (mainly Germany). Having spent his youth in pre-war multicultural Łódź and – after the outbreak of WW II – having been a prisoner of war in Soviet camps, in December 1949 Dedecius moved to the GDR, from where he fled three years later with his family to West Germany. For 25 years he had divided – his life between literary translation, notably poetry, work as an insurance agent and family matters, and after retiring he managed to set up the Deutsches Polen-Institut, a non-governmental institution devoted to the popularisation of Polish literature in Germany, which he led in the years 1980–1998. As one of his close collaborators states, Dedecius’s editorial legacy comprises about 200 books which he either translated, wrote or edited, with poetry translations and literary essays being the core of his literary activity. He rendered some 3,000 poems of roughly 300 Polish poets into German and composed ca. 10 books that present and analyse – chiefly the 20th-century – Polish literature; some of them also contain essays on translation, fragments of which are cited and commented in the present article. Another important source and basis of considerations is Dedecius’s autobiography Ein Europäer aus Lodz [A European from Łódź], which explains the background of the author’s life at its different stages.