Robert Stiller

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Robert Stiller (born in Warsaw, Poland, 1928) is a Polish translator, writer and polyglot. In 2005 he ran for the Polish Sejm as a candidate of Janusz Korwin-Mikke's Platform party.

[edit] Life and work

Stiller has an active command of 30 languages, including English, German, French, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Czech, Malay, two Lusatian languages, Latin, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, as well as Sanskrit, Greek and a couple of Polynesian languages.

In addition to his translations, he is a playwright and the author of books and essays about language. He is also co-founder of a Reform Jewish community and an exponent of reviving Reform Judaism in Poland.

Stiller has worked in occupations unconnected with translating and writing books. He writes of his youth (introduction to his anthology, Strofy z dreszczykiem, Warsaw, Iskry, 1986): "I was a fairly nervous boy and was afraid of ghosts until, at age sixteen, I happened to take up a line of work, a large part of which involved dead human bodies and mortuaries."

Among Stiller's literary oeuvre, of particular note is his version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, in which Stiller has succeeded in conveying at once both the sense and the sound of the original, despite all the novel's formal literary complexities.

Stiller's Krymhilda is not so much a faithful translation of the Nibelungenlied as a compilation of available complete German versions of the Nibelungenlied stories and of their variants concealed in the Eddas (the older and the newer, "prosaic" one) and in other works. On the other hand, precisely this makes Krymhilda interesting; also notable are several formal operations performed by Stiller, including the choice of a prose form that has permitted a fuller rendering of the story.

Also noteworthy is Stiller's Anthology of Malay Literature, which includes nearly 80 pages of introduction and over 500 pages of the most varied texts, translated from the Malay.

Shortly after the 2006 death of his old friend and fellow-author, Stanisław Lem, of science-fiction fame, Stiller published an intriguing volume of reminiscences — Lemie! po co umarłeś? Opowieść w reminiscencjach (Lem, What Did You Die For? A Story in Reminiscences), Kraków, vis-à-vis/etiuda, 2006.