Krystyna Janda
On Saturday I went to a meeting with Krystyna Janda presented by The National Creativity Centre Foundation, in the National Gallery in Dublin. The meeting principally took the form of a questions and answers session, conducted by the famous Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, ahead of the Irish première of Krystyna Janda’s monologue adaptation of Vedrana Rudan’s Ear, Throat, Knife.
Whilst the interview was pretty interesting, given Janda’s extremely busy and varied career, the translating at the event was a little under par. The predominance of Polish speakers in the audience meant that the poor translator didn’t always get a say until after a few questions had been asked or answered, and her pretty difficult task of translating her own shorthand wasn’t helped by Mr Zanussi interrupting occasionally to demonstrate his own knowledge of English, and I was frankly embarrassed for the poor translator. Most questions focused dealt with Janda’s career in acting, both on stage and on the silver screen, from her early roles in films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) or working alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, to her more recent work with the Polonia Theatre in Warsaw. Many of the audience’s questions focused on her family life, work in politics and music, and just where she finds the energy to keep it all going. Not sure if she answered that sufficiently, but she did suggest that there would be more going on in her blog in the future.
