Czesław Ratka (born 1952) is a Polish engineer and translator. He graduated at Politechnika Śląska (

Silesian University of Technology The Silesian University of Technology (Polish language, Polish name: Politechnika Śląska; ) is a university located in the Polish province of Silesia, with most of its facilities in the city of Gliwice. It was founded in 1945 by Polish profes ...

) in

Gliwice Gliwice (; , ) is a city in Upper Silesia, in southern Poland. The city is located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Kłodnica river (a tributary of the Oder River, Oder). It lies approximately 25 km west from Katowice, the regional capital ...

. He specialised in electronics. He was especially concerned with

hygrometry Psychrometrics (or psychrometry, ; also called hygrometry) is the field of engineering concerned with the physical and thermodynamic properties of gas-vapor mixtures. History With the inventions of the hygrometer and thermometer, the theorie ...

. He has been interested in Spanish language and literature for forty years. He is famous for translating two parts of ''

La Araucana ''La Araucana'' (also known in English as ''The Araucaniad'') is a 16th-century epic poem in Spanish by Alonso de Ercilla, about the Spanish Conquest of Chile. It was considered the national epic of the Captaincy General of Chile and one of the ...

'' (''The Araucaniad'') by the 16th-century Spanish poet

Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga Alonso is a Spanish name of Germanic origin that is a Castilian variant of ''Adalfuns''. The original Visigothic name ''Alfonso'' suffered the phonetic change of the phoneme /f/ into the mute /h/ in the Early Middle Ages (around 9th Century), ...

(1533–1594). For this translation he was awarded with the

Cervantes Institute Instituto Cervantes (, the Cervantes Institute) is a worldwide nonprofit organization created by the Spanish government in 1991. It is named after Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), the author of ''Don Quixote'' and perhaps the most important fig ...

Award. In his translation Czesław Ratka retained the

ottava rima Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio. The ottav ...

of the original. His version of the poem is regarded as excellent by critics and other translators, for example by Wojciech Charchalis and Florian Śmieja. Czesław Ratka's work was compared to Piotr Kochanowski's translation of ''

Jerusalem Delivered ''Jerusalem Delivered'', also known as ''The Liberation of Jerusalem'' ( ; ), is an epic poem by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, first published in 1581, that tells a largely mythified version of the First Crusade in which Christian knights, l ...

'' by

Torquato Tasso Torquato Tasso ( , also , ; 11 March 154425 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1591 poem ''Gerusalemme liberata'' (Jerusalem Delivered), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between ...

(1618).Czesław Ratka and his "Araucana."
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References

1952 births Polish translators Living people 21st-century Polish engineers 20th-century Polish engineers {{Poland-translator-stub