Pharaoh

Bolesław Prus (1847-1912), who took the pen surname Prus from the appellation of his family’s coat of arms,  at age 15 joined the 1863 Polish Uprising against Imperial Russia, where he suffered severe battle injuries.  He was spared resettlement on Russian imperial lands and was able to complete secondary school. He studied mathematics and physics at Warsaw University, until his studies there were cut short by penury.  At age 25 in 1872, Prus embarked on a forty-year career as a newspaper columnist, urging Poles to study science and technology and to develop industry and commerce.  After achieving great acclaim with his short stories, between 1886 and 1893 he wrote three novels on the “great questions of our age”: The Outpost, The Doll, and The New Woman. In 1894-95, he completed his only historical novel, Pharaoh. Christopher Kasparek, son of World War II Polish Armed Forces veterans, was born in Scotland. He produced an initial draft translation of Pharaoh while in secondary school.  After pre-medical studies at Monterey Peninsula College, from 1965-66 he studied Polish literature at the University of California, Berkeley with 1980 Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, including participation in Miłosz’s seminars translating Polish poetry. In 1972-78 Kasparek studied medicine at Warsaw Medical School, in Poland.  During that time, he translated papers and two books, A History of Six Ideas and On Perfection, by the doyen of Polish philosophers, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. After receiving his medical degree, Kasparek translated the standard history of Polish breaking of German Enigma-machine ciphers (a cryptological achievement which, a month before the outbreak of World War II, Poland shared with France and Britain, enabling Britain to break Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park):  Władysław Kozaczuk,  Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, Maryland, University Publications of America, 1984. Kasparek subsequently practiced psychiatry for 33 years in California, where he resides. He has also published translations of sections of several other books; as well as articles and translations on a wide range of subjects in publications including The Monterey Herald; The Daily Californian (the U.C. Berkeley student newspaper); Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa (Logology [or] Science of Science; Warsaw—a quarterly of the Polish Academy of Sciences); Dialectics and Humanism: The Polish Philosophical Quarterly; Cryptologia; The Polish Review; Psychiatric News; The Psychiatric Times; Clinical Psychiatry News; and many articles and translations in the online Wikipedia and Wikisource.  He resides in Carmel, California.