Mary McCarthy and Cecylia Wojewoda: The Story of a Friendship

Abstract This article describes the friendship between Mary McCarthy, the American writer of fiction and essays, and Cecylia Wojewoda, her Polish translator. In her youth, Wojewoda was an aspiring poet and playwright; later she became a respected translator of Anglo-American literature (especially theater). The two women first met in Warsaw in 1959. The author, McCarthy’s son, describes, with ample citations from the correspondence, a warm and complex relationship, which transcended factual matters associated with translation. He evokes the give-and-take in this “marriage of true minds,” the two principals’ erudition, and their shared love of Shakespeare. A tie of mutual sympathy kept the friendship going until McCarthy’s death in 1989. The article sheds light on Wojewoda’s earlier life, including a harrowing time in Slovakia in 1944, during the Slovak uprising against the Nazis, and her husband Bolesław’s premature death in London two years later.