Polish Heritage Day Celebrations in Stratford upon Avon, 8th May 2022

Updated: Dec 31, 2022

May 2022 has been a wonderful time of celebrating Polish Heritage and exciting collaboration with our other ethnic minority community friends from Stratford upon Avon. This collaboration resulted in a thrilling, unique experience of a Polish Heritage Day which focused on celebrating translations of Shakespeare in Polish and other community languages.

Our Polish Heritage day celebrations took place on Sunday 26th May 2022 and were proceeded by flying the Polish national flag at the Waterside community flagpole, organized by the Stratford Town Hall.

The Polish Heritage Day was a magical evening with community spirit at its heart, attended by Kevin Taylor, the town Mayor and his wife Pauline Grant-Taylor and local councellors.

It comprised superb readings from the staff and children from the Jan Brzechwa Polish Saturday School in Stratford upon Avon, all gathered in the beautiful walls of the Guild Chapel building.

We presented Stanislaw Baranczak’s translations of Shakespeare - considered a truly Renaissance figure, Baranczak was a distinguished scholar, translator and political activist who was forced to flee the repressions of communist government and sought refuge in the US. Baranczak translated nearly all of William Shakespeare’s works into Polish, making his renditions feel contemporary and much cherished by the Polish readers and actors.

COPERNICANA CIC was also delighted to be joined in these celebrations by its international friends who presented excerpts from Shakespeare in their mother tongues. We enjoyed a literary banquet of eight translations of Shakespeare into the following languages: Ukrainian (Oksana Tatar), Hungarian (Anna Gubis), French (Claudine Pearson), Danish (Sophie Clausen), Tamil (Hemila Nelson), Czech (Lucie Zawada), Luganda (Peter Bazira), Italian (Manuela Perthegella) and English (Danny Masewicz).

The second part of the evening was led by Marek and Ania Was who, along with their esteemed music ensemble, took us on an enchanting journey around some of the most iconic Polish music pieces, arranged and directed by Marek Was. The music included pieces by Polish Renaissance composer Stanislaw Gomulka, Fryderyk Chopin, Polish film music and traditional Polish folk tunes. The event ended with Marek’s arrangement of ‘Dream about Warsaw' – a much-loved piece by one of the most influential artists in Polish pop music of the XXth century, Czeslaw Niemen.

Huge thank you to Anna Gubis for creating our lovely poster and all our amazing friends - readers, musicians and guests who supported us and attended the Polish Heritage Day event at the Guild Chapel to mark the annual season of celebrations of Polish culture and history in the UK.

A special thank you to Jolanta Rzegocka for her advice on various aspects of the event.

We would also like to say a huge thank you to The Stratford Town Trust for its generous

support in this event.

Here’s a useful list of the translated extracts from Shakespeare and the languages that were spoken:

Ukrainian

Read by Oksana

‘T’red with all these’ Sonnet 66

The most powerful in its tone - in the communist times, members of the opposition in Central European countries knew it by heart in the original, this extract from Shakespeare is a strong voice against all censorship, authoritarianism, and oppression.

Polish

Midsummer Night’s Dream Act II Scene II

Ania Bhatia – Titania

Elves – Polish Saturday School

Midsummer Night’s dream Act III scene I

Titania: Bianka Pawłowska

Podszewka/ Bottom – Jędrzej

Midsummer night’s Dream Act IV scene I

Titania - Monika Pawlowska

Podszewka/ Bottom - Karol Pawlowski

The other characters - Agata Pawlowska

Midsummer Night’s dream Act V scene I final speech