Łobodowski, Józef

Łobodowski, Józef, b 19 March 1909 in Purviškė near Vilnius, d 18 April 1988 in Madrid, Spain. Polish poet, literary critic, and translator. Before the Second World War he published a few collections of engagé poetry in Poland. From 1945 he lived in Spain, where he published over a dozen more collections. He continued the tradition of the Ukrainian school in Polish literature and wrote many poems on Ukrainian themes; they are included in Rozmova z Ojczyzną (Conversation with the Fatherland, 1936), Złota gramota (The Golden Charter, 1954), Pieśń o Ukrainie (Song about Ukraine, 1959), and other collections. From the 1930s on he also translated into Polish works by many Ukrainian writers, among them Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Bahriany, Lada Mohylianska, and Olena Teliha, and he wrote about those authors and Ukrainian literature in general, mostly in the Polish émigré monthly Kultura (Paris). His poetry has been translated into Ukrainian by Sviatoslav Hordynsky, Bohdan Kravtsiv, Yar Slavutych, and Leonid Poltava.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]