Paweł Hertz

He was born in a family of Polish Jews to Michał Hertz and Paulina nee Turower.[1] He attended Gimnazjum im. Mikołaja Reja in Warsaw, dropped out on his own volition and never attempted the final exams. In 1935–1937 he traveled through Austria and Italy, sometimes accompanied by people such as Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Late 1937 he started living in Paris where he attended lectures on Écoles des Hautes Études Internationales. In gay circles he was sometimes called "the princess of Israel".[2]

In the summer of 1939 he returned to Poland. After the outbreak of World War II, he reached Lviv via the Stradecz estate. There, in January 1940, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Russians in the Zamarstyniv prison, and then sentenced to eight years in the camp, after which he was sent to the camp in Ivdel in Siberia through the prisons in Kherson and Dnepropetrovsk. After the Sikorski–Mayski agreement and the amnesty, he reached the Polish delegation in Almaty. In 1942, at the request of the delegation of the Polish Embassy, he started organizing Polish schools in Kyrgyzstan, and then became a representative of the Polish embassy. After the break of diplomatic relations between the Polish government and the Soviet authorities, he was arrested again. After his release, he went to Samarkand, where until the fall of 1944 he worked as a librarian of the Samarkand District Museum and a bibliographer at the A. Pushkin. He described his experiences from this period, among others in the book Sedan (1948). He returned to Poland in December 1945 and initially settled in Łódź, in 1949 he moved permanently to Warsaw, where he continued his creative work and worked as an editor.

Since 1945 he was a member of staff of a weekly „Kuźnica", and became a member of PPR (in 1948 renamed to PZPR).[2] Soon he took an oppositional stance to the party.[2] In 1957 he left PZPR. In March 1964 he signed Letter of 34 in defense of freedom of speech. W 1969 he became a member of Polish PEN Club board. In the years 1975–1978 he was vice-president, and from December 1980 a member of the board of the Polish Writers' Union. He was a member of the Council for the Pastoral Care of Creative Communities (Rada Duszpasterstwa Środowisk Twórczych) and the Council for Polish-Jewish Relations (Rada do Spraw Stosunków Polsko-Żydowskich) under the President of the Republic of Poland (1991–1995). He was a correspondent member of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. He was buried at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw (section 119–6–17).[3] Czesław Miłosz based a character of Piotr Kwinto from the novel Zdobycie władzy (1955) on Hertz.[4]

He debuted aged 16 with a poem Popiół (Ash) in „Wiadomości Literackie" (1934 issue 29), in the interwar period he published his poems also in „Skamander" magazine. His first volume of collected poems Nocna muzyka (Night music) was out when he was 17 (1935). Following years he published his poems in „Tygodnik Powszechny", „Nowa Kultura", „Kuźnica", „Więź", „Znaki czasu", „Zeszyty Literackie". His closest friends included Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Zygmunt Mycielski, Antoni Sobański, Stefan Kisielewski, Julian Stryjkowski, Henryk Krzeczkowski; he kept in touch with the staff of Paris' "Kultura" – incl. Józef Czapski, Zygmunt Hertz, Konstanty Jeleński. In 1945–48 he belonged to staff of „Kuźnica".In the years 1949–52 he was the head of the editorial board of classical Russian literature at the State Publishing Institute, 1954–1959 he was a member of the editorial committee of the Dictionary of the Polish Language, and in the years 1955–1978 and 1979–1982 he co-edited "Rocznik Literacki", in 1978 he joined the editorial board of the journal " Res Publica" (then "Nowa Res Publica "), in 1990 he belonged to the editorial board of Tygodnik „Solidarność". In 1957 he was one of the initiators and members of the editorial board of the monthly "Europa" (the magazine was suspended by the authorities before the first issue was published). He prepared a monumental 7-volume anthology of 19th-century Polish poetry, Zbiór poetów polskich XIX-wieku (Collection of 19th-century Polish poets) (vol. I – VII, 1959–1979). He compiled Księga cytatów z polskiej literatury pięknej (Book of citations from Polish literature) (with Władysław Kopaliński, 1975), and edited numerous editions of Polish writers and poets (incl. Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, Jan Kasprowicz, Zygmunt Krasiński, Teofil Lenartowicz, Juliusz Słowacki). He initiated the reprinting of books valuable for Polish culture (he was a member of the Program Council for Reprinting at the Art and Film Publishing House – Rada Programowa do Spraw Reprintów przy Wydawnictwach Artystycznych i Filmowych). 1977 he initiated in Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy series „Podróże", (travels) where he redacted and published 18 volumes of classic travel literature. He redacted polish anthologies of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy. He has been awarded many times for his translation work, which included translating Anna Achmatowa, Joseph Brodsky, Jacob Burckhardt, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Pavel Muratov, Marcel Proust, Ivan Turgenev.

Grave of Paweł Hertz on Powązkowski Cemetery in Warsaw

• PEN Club award for translations of French literature (1971)
• Fundacja Alfreda Jurzykowskiego award (1972)
• PEN Club award for outstanding editorial work (1978)
• Literatura na Świecie award for translation work (1995)
• ZAiKS award for translation work (1996)

• Knight's Cross of Order of Polonia Restituta (1974)
• Commander's Cross of Order of Polonia Restituta (1996)