Pharaoh

Bolesław Prus (1847-1912), who took the pen surname Prusfrom the appellation of his family’s coat of arms,  at age 15 joined the 1863 Polish Uprisingagainst Imperial Russia, where he suffered severe battle injuries.  He was spared resettlement on Russian imperiallands and was able to complete secondary school. He studied mathematics andphysics at Warsaw University, until his studies there were cut short by penury.  At age 25 in 1872, Prus embarked on a forty-yearcareer as a newspaper columnist, urging Poles to study science and technologyand to develop industry and commerce.  Afterachieving great acclaim with his short stories, between 1886 and 1893 he wrotethree novels on the “great questions of our age”: The Outpost, TheDoll, and The New Woman. In 1894-95, he completed his onlyhistorical novel, Pharaoh.Christopher Kasparek, son of World War II PolishArmed Forces veterans, was born in Scotland. He produced an initial drafttranslation of Pharaoh while in secondary school.  After pre-medical studies at MontereyPeninsula College, from 1965-66 he studied Polish literature at the Universityof California, Berkeley with 1980 Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, includingparticipation in Miłosz’s seminars translating Polish poetry.In 1972-78 Kasparek studied medicine at Warsaw MedicalSchool, in Poland.  During that time, hetranslated papers and two books, A History of Six Ideas and OnPerfection, by the doyen of Polish philosophers, Władysław Tatarkiewicz.After receiving his medical degree, Kasparek translated thestandard history of Polish breaking of German Enigma-machine ciphers (acryptological achievement which, a month before the outbreak of World War II, Polandshared with France and Britain, enabling Britain to break Enigma ciphers atBletchley Park):  Władysław Kozaczuk,  Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher WasBroken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, edited andtranslated by Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, Maryland, UniversityPublications of America, 1984. Kasparek subsequently practiced psychiatry for 33 years inCalifornia, where he resides.He has also published translations of sections of severalother books; as well as articles and translations on a wide range of subjectsin 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 ofSciences); 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 theonline Wikipedia and Wikisource. He resides in Carmel, California.