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Christopher Kasparek

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Christopher Kasparek (born 1945) is a Scottish-born writer of Polish descent who has translated works by numerous Polish authors, including Ignacy Krasicki, Bolesław Prus, Florian Znaniecki, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Marian Rejewski, and Władysław Kozaczuk, as well as the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of 3 May 1791.

He has published papers of his own on the history of the World War II era; Enigma decryption; Bolesław Prus and his novel Pharaoh; the theory and practice of translation; logology (science of science); multiple independent discovery; psychiatric nosology; and electronic health records.

Life[edit]

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Józef and Stanisława (Sylvia[1]) Kasparek, World War II Polish Armed Forces (both of them, Army and Air Force) veterans, Kasparek lived several years in London, England, before sailing with his family in December 1951 on the Queen Elizabeth to the United States.

In 1966 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with a University of California Departmental Citation for Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement, from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied Polish literature with the future (1980) Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.

In 1967 he received a Master of Library Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Librarianship, and worked several years as a professional librarian.

In 1978 Kasparek received a medical degree from Warsaw Medical School, in Poland. For 33 years, 1983–2016, he practiced psychiatry in California.

Translator[edit]

Kasparek has translated:

  • papers (including "Outline of the History of Philosophy in Poland," The Polish Review, vol. XVIII, no. 3, 1973, pp. 73–85; and "The Concept of Poetry," 1975) and books (On Perfection, 1979; and A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980) by historian of philosophy and esthetics Władysław Tatarkiewicz;
  • military historian Władysław Kozaczuk's ground-breaking book, 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[2]);
  • works by journalist, short-story writer, novelist, and philosopher Bolesław Prus: On Discoveries and Inventions (1873); short stories; and the historical novel Pharaoh (1895), translated from the Polish, with foreword and notes, by Christopher Kasparek, Amazon Kindle e-book, 2020, ASIN:BO8MDN6CZV (preceded by two hardbound book versions, published in Warsaw in 1991 and 2001, respectively by Polonia Publishers and Polestar Publications, and distributed by Hippocrene Books);
  • verse, including selected Fables and Parables by Ignacy Krasicki;
  • the Constitution of 3 May 1791 (published in 1985 and republished in many venues); available on Wikisource;
  • and scholarly and literary works by numerous other Polish authors.

Bibliography[edit]

A partial list of works written or translated by Christopher Kasparek:

Articles[edit]

  • "The Social Case of the Theory of Relativity: Why They Know Not What They Do, and How They Know Anything At All", The Daily Californian, vol. 195, no. 6 (Tuesday, July 11, 1967) – Weekly Magazine [section], issue number 26, volume 2 (July 11, 1967) – pp. 5–6, 8.
  • a series of book reviews in the Monterey Peninsula Herald in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Sheldon Novick, The Careless Atom, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969, about the dangers – since, amply confirmed – of nuclear reactors.
  • review of Robert Olby, The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA (1974), in Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa (Logology [or] Science of Science; a quarterly), Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, vol. 14, no 3, 1978, pp. 461–63.
  • with Richard A. Woytak, "In Memoriam Marian Rejewski", Cryptologia, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1982), pp. 19–25.
  • "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 83–87.
  • with Richard A. Woytak, "The Top Secret of World War II", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 98–103.
  • "National System?", Psychiatric News, 21 December 1990, p. 17. Proposal to create an internet-linked system of computerized individual medical records which, with proper privacy safeguards, would make an individual's health history available to his attending physician, wherever the individual might find himself. This could prevent needless delays and errors in medical treatment and create an anonymized data source for epidemiological studies.
  • "Psychiatry and Special Interests", The Psychiatric Times, February 1991, p. 6. Discussed, among other things, are public confusion of psychiatry with psychology; the desirability of greater terminological clarity in psychiatry, e.g. by spelling "Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder" with the two hyphens rather than with just the first hyphen; psychiatry's peculiar practice of capitalizing the names of psychiatric disorders ("internal medicine... does not need to capitalize hepatitis or myocardial infarction"); and a suggestion to replace the diagnostic term "schizophrenia" (which the lay public has often misread as "split personality") with "psychosis", which is, to all practical purposes, an orphan term.
  • "Prescribing Privileges", Psychiatric News, vol. XXVI, no. 18 (20 September 1991), p. 17. Reductio ad absurdum of some psychologists' request that they be granted medication-prescribing privileges.
  • "Time to Rename Schizophrenia", Clinical Psychiatry News, vol. 21, no. 8 (August 1993), p. 6. Proposal that the last psychiatric nosological entity still bearing a recondite Greek name be renamed to something more comprehensible, such as "psychosis". A precedent is the renaming of the former "paranoia" to the more descriptive "delusional disorder". (All the other "psychotic disorders" have their own specific names, and lumping them together as "psychoses" has no theoretical or practical advantage, especially since psychiatry's abandonment of the former antithetic term "neurosis"; thus the "psychosis" category is now essentially vacant.) A similar suggestion has since been made, in 2009, by psychiatrist Jim van Os, who has proposed that "schizophrenia" be renamed "psychotic spectrum disorder".
  • "Prus' Pharaoh: the Creation of a Historical Novel", The Polish Review, vol. XXXIX, no. 1, 1994, pp. 45–50.
  • "Two Micro-stories by Bolesław Prus", The Polish Review, vol. XL, no. 1, 1995, pp. 99–103.
  • "Prus' Pharaoh: Primer on Power", The Polish Review, vol. XL, no. 3, 1995, pp. 331–34.
  • "Prus' Pharaoh and the Wieliczka Salt Mine", The Polish Review, vol. XLII, no. 3, 1997, pp. 349–55.
  • "Prus' Pharaoh and the Solar Eclipse", The Polish Review, vol. XLII, no. 4, 1997, pp. 471–78.
  • "Enigma and Poland Revisited", The Polish Review, vol. XLVII, no. 1, 2002, pp. 97–103.
  • "A Futurological Note: Prus on H.G. Wells and the Year 2000," The Polish Review, vol. XLVIII, no. 1, 2003, pp. 89–100.
  • partial "Corrigendum" – to Christopher Kasparek's "A Futurological Note: Prus on H.G. Wells and the Year 2000" – in The Polish Review, vol. XLVIII, no. 3, 2003, p. 387.
  • "Krystyna Skarbek: Re-viewing Britain's Legendary Polish Agent", The Polish Review, vol. XLIX, no. 3, 2004, pp. 945–953.
  • letter to the editor – responding to "Krystyna Skarbek: a Letter" from Ronald Nowicki, pp. 93–101 in vol. L, no. 1, 2005 – in The Polish Review, vol. L, no. 2, 2005, pp. 253–55, including corrections to typographical errors in Christopher Kasparek's article on Krystyna Skarbek in The Polish Review, vol. XLIX, no. 3, 2004.
  • review of Michael Alfred Peszke, The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II, foreword by Piotr S. Wandycz, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland and Company, 2005, ISBN 0-7864-2009-X, in The Polish Review, vol. L, no. 2, 2005, pp. 237–41.
  • review of Michael Alfred Peszke, The Armed Forces of Poland in the West, 1939–46: Strategic Concepts, Planning, Limited Success but No Victory!, Solihull, Helion, 2013, ISBN 978-1908916549; and Polskie siły abrojne na Zachodzie, 1939-1946: Koncepcje strategiczne i realia geopolityki [The Polish Armed Forces in the West, 1939-1946: Strategic Concepts and Geopolitical Realities], translated [into Polish] by Tomasz Fiedorek, Poznań, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2014, ISBN 978-83-7818-547-5; in The Polish Review, vol. 61, no. 1, 2016, pp. 101–102.

Translations[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Acknowledgements in Józef Kasparek-Obst, The Constitutions of Poland and of the United States: Kinships and Genealogy, 1980.
  2. ^ Enigma, edited, translated and augmented by Kasparek, has been described as "the Bible" on the Polish foundations of World War II Enigma decryption by Zdzisław Jan Kapera in his "Appendix F" to Władysław Kozaczuk and Jerzy Straszak, Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code, New York, Hippocrene Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7818-0941-X, pp. 135–36.

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