Letter from Stanisław Wędkiewicz written 15.09.1949
ACADEMIE POLONAISE DES SCIENCES ET DES LETTRES
CENTRE POLONAIS DE RECHERCHES SCIENTIFIQUES A PARIS
74. RUE LAURISTON, PARIS-XVI – TELEPHONE: COP. 51-91
Paris, 9/15/1949
No. 1146/49
Honorable Colleague,
v I am writing back to you with some delay, but I had to wait for the staff of the Polish Bookshop to return to check your account balance. Yesterday I was given the exact invoice which shows that the balance in your favor amounts to F 20,600. So please send us a list of the books you need.
v The difficulties with importing books from Belgium and Switzerland to France have not decreased. Applications in the French Foreign Exchange Commission are lying around in wait for months. I have been waiting for one Swiss publication I need for a year, and I will probably have to keep waiting, even though I ordered it from a French bookstore, which has a fairly large range of books published in Switzerland.
v I shall move on to the matter of your Poetics. As we have already discussed in Krakow, I have no right to demand from the authors of dissertations to keep the changes to their texts introduced by Mr. Paweł Kucharski. I have full confidence that he is one of the best experts in the French language. Terminology is another matter, as it should be determined according to the norms adopted in France for phenomenological concepts. The literature on this subject is so extensive in France that it should not be difficult to invent appropriate neologisms.
v I do not understand Mr. Willman’s irritability. After all, a number of French scholars submit their work for stylistic corrections to experts renowned in French all the time. I do not consider myself to be one, but based on the judgments of the French, it would be difficult for me to consider French in the publications of PAAS and other Polish scientific societies to be on a satisfactory level.
v “Archivum Neophilologicum” unfortunately has no friendly guardians in our country. The neo-phililogists of the Academy claim not to have the time. The Academy has not responded to any of my complaints, so I have no information about the current condition of the first three issues, which have long been sent to the Office of Press Control. It would be much different had my plan to print the Archivum in France been fulfilled, however, the permission for it from the Foreign Exchange Commission is out of the question.
v I am sorry that indirectly at my fault the Professor’s work has not yet seen the light of day. So please, feel free to publish it in Polish, and you can do so in French later, either in the Archivum or in the Studia Philosophica, if that can speed up the matter.
v My deepest respect and best regards,
Stanisław Wędkiewicz
P.S.
Mr. Kucharski’s work on Plato has already been printed in full: it is an impressive volume of four hundred pages. Since Mr. Kucharski – which I cannot really understand – has decided to make this work his thesis based on which he will be aiming to obtain the Dr. ès l. degree (afterall, he already has the ès sc. title), the book will only be available for sale after the discussion at Sorbonne, at the beginning of next year.
Professor Roman Ingarden
Krakow, Biskupi Square 14