The Polish Book Institute

Prof. Dalibor Blažina received the annual award of the Croatian Literary Translators’ Association for his translation of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's Nienasycenie (“Insatiability”) into Croatian. The award has been granted since 1953. The publication of the book was supported by the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme.

Prof. Dalibor Blažina is a lecturer of Polish literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb. He is the author of numerous scientific, popular, and lexicographic texts devoted to Polish literature, including the volumes "Catastrophism and Dramatic Structure. On Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz” (1993), "In the Aura of Forefathers’ Eve. Essays and Treatises on Polish Literature and its Croatian Reception" (2005), and "Paradox of the Critic. Jan Kott in the Textual Sphere of Culture" (2011). Since 1998, he has been the editor-in-chief of the scientific and literary journal "Književna smotra". He has translated texts by Witkacy, Bruno Schulz, Czesław Miłosz, Jan Kott, Andrzej Szczypiorski, Piotr Szewiec, Piotr Paziński, and other Polish writers into Croatian.

He published a selection of Witkacy's dramas (Iz djela, 1985, including translations of W małym dworku ("Country House"), Wariat i zakonnica (“The Madman and the Nun”), Szalona lokomotywa ("The Crazy Locomotive"), Kurka wodna (The Water Hen"), Szewcy ("The Shoemakers”), and Wstęp do Czystej formy w teatrze ("An Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in Theatre"). He also published Juvenilia and Matka ("The Mother") in magazines. In his book devoted to Witkacy, he dealt with catastrophism and reading Witkacy's theatre plays on the basis of Anne Ubersfeld's actancial model. He wrote, among other things, about Witkacy's stay in Lovran, Witkacy's reception in Croatia, and the issues with the translation of The Shoemakers into Croatian. In 2003, he received the Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Award of the Polish ITI-UNESCO Centre for promoting Polish theatre culture in the world.