I had crossed paths with Jacques Burko in several places, but we truly came to know each other on the occasion of the translation of Adam Czerniakow’s Carnets du ghetto de Varsovie (Warsaw Ghetto Diaries), published in 1996 by La Découverte.
Initially, the translation of these Carnets, written by the man who presided over the ghetto Council from September 1939 to July 23, 1942 (the date on which he took his own life), had been entrusted to Maria Elster, a survivor of the ghetto. Stricken with the cancer she would die of, Maria Elster could not continue this work, entrusting to me “this translation unlike any other,” as she wrote to the publisher. Faced with the magnitude of the task, I asked Jacques to be so kind as to join me in the translation.
Czerniakow’s text was spare, notes jotted down on a scrap of paper, presumably intended for some later publication. Its value is factual, historical, not literary. Jacques, who introduced some of the greatest Polish poets into France (Tuwim, Herbert, Szymborska), had a spontaneous tendency to embellish Czerniakow’s sentences a little, and I had to “fight” against him to restore the banality of the author’s phrasing. Conversely, he corrected many of my errors, knowing far better than I did both Polish and the language of the Occupation. And so it was a homogeneous text that was offered to the French reader.
Out of this frequent companionship of two translators with very different leanings — Jacques loved the Polish language and wanted to convey its beautiful texts, whereas I have no such taste — there was born a friendship forged in Czerniakow’s little sentences.
In the afterword I wrote for that volume (“L’énigme polonaise” — “The Polish Enigma”), a reflection on the stance of the Polish witness toward the Jewish tragedy, there appears Czeslaw Milosz’s famous poem Campo di Fiori, magnificently translated by Jacques Burko.
This friendship became complicity during the meetings of the Gaston Crémieux circle, and above all of Plurielles, where we represented “the Polish tendency” within the editorial committee.
Like all of us, I am left a little orphaned by Jacques.