In Estonia, Inny świat (“A World Apart”) has been recently published. The book was translated by Hendrik Lindepu, the winner of this year’s Transatlantyk Award. The publication of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s work was supported by the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme.
Teine maiilm, which is the title of the Estonian edition of the book, was published at the end of 2019 by Hendrik Lindepuu Kirjastus publishing house in Tallin.
A World Apart is one of the most important testimonies of the prisoner of the gulag and, at the same time, one of the most important works in the history of Polish – and world – literature of the 20th century. A shocking vivisection of the mechanisms of Soviet totalitarianism and the image of human nature exposed to the hardest of trials. In a word: a book which, as Albert Camus said, “should be published and read in all countries of the world”.
Hendrik Lindepuu is the most important contemporary translator of Polish literature into Estonian, a true one-man-institution. In 2002, he founded his own one-man publishing house so as to be able to publish translations from Polish literature. In recent years, with the support of the Book Institute, his translations of Piękni dwudziestoletni (‘Pretty Twenty-Year Olds’) by Marek Hłasko, Jak kochać dziecko, Prawo dziecka do szacunku (‘How to Love a Child’, ‘The Child’s Right to Respect’) by Janusz Korczak, Bukareszt. Krew i kurz (‘Bucharest. Dust and Blood’) by Małgorzata Rejmer, Rok myśliwego (“A Year of the Hunter”) by Czesław Miłosz, Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (“The Hourglass Sanatorium”) by Bruno Schulz, as well as a selection of texts by Sławomir Mrożek and Leszek Kołakowski were published.
