Is physical fitness important for learning foreign languages? How can one pass a university admission test in French without actually knowing the language? How does language affect our understanding of the world? Ireneusz Kania, a translator with competence in more than 20 languages, is interviewed by Łukasz Kaniewski and Tomasz Stawiszyński.

Łukasz Kaniewski and Tomasz Stawiszyński: You are a polyglot who translates [into Polish] religious texts that originate from very distant spiritual traditions. Can you tell us about how you got into such a fascinating field?

Ireneusz Kania: It is difficult for me to pinpoint any specific trigger that first sparked my interest, but I think it was something related to stamps. I started collecting stamps before I could read. This was mostly by ungluing them from envelopes, since in the small town of Wieluń where I was born, no one had even heard of a specialist shop for philatelists. Collecting stamps back then was something completely different from what it is today. Stamp collectors were almost like a secret sect, meeting and swapping stamps. A wonderful subculture, I feel hugely indebted to them. So even when I couldn’t yet read Polish, I could already tell Chinese writing from Tibetan or Thai characters. And it all seemed so fascinating to me. I had four Chinese stamps with strange pictures and two visibly distinct kinds of writing. It was a mystery no one could explain to me. I finally learned what was on these stamps only when I was 21.

Then I realized that what really fascinated me was other spiritual worlds. I wanted to enter those worlds, first via the languages. I thought I would master languages to be able to read the important texts I had heard about here and there. I wanted to read their original versions, because I intuitively felt what I later became certain of, that even very good translations are but a bleak reflection of the aesthetic qualities and cognitive content of the original. Another issue is that such really good translations are really scarce. So I started to learn languages.

You studied by yourself?

I learn everything by myself, even sports techniques. I would not, however, recommend this to others, because you can pick up errors which are difficult to eliminate later on.

Which language was your first?

I learned Italian when I was 16. I was in a sanatorium and incidentally came across The Divine Comedy in a Polish translation. It was an amazing experience that could be likened to an epiphany for me. I said to myself: “How beautiful it must be in the original if it has so much allure in the translation.” And I started learning Italian, which took me 10 months.

In the sanatorium?

Yes.