Halina Wierzyńska – on war and immigration travels

Abstract

The text is the first printing of the interview with Halina Wierzyńska, the widow after Kazimierz Wierzyński, recorded in New York in the late 1970s for the Polish Institute of Science and conducted by Jerzy Tepa. The subject of their conversation were the whereabouts of the Wierzyńskis’ departure from Warsaw in September 1939 after the outbreak of war, the stages of their wandering (through Romania, France, Brazil to the United States), and the experiences related to settling in a foreign country; in this context, Wierzyńska tells about the poet’s works written at that time, which were a testimony of both his patriotic and immigration experiences. The account also indirectly hints at the enormous effort of daily existence, resulting from the necessity of constant travelling due to, among other factors, the need to search for means of providing for oneself. The introduction to the interview indicates the basic problems related to preparing a printed version of a text whose original for was a sound recording. The publication is at the same time an invitation made to the editors’ circles to engage in a discussion on the theoretical assumptions and methodological tips concerning the “translation” of a recording into printed text.