Czaykowski, Bogdan

Bogdan Czaykowski (1932–2007) was a historian, literary critic, poet, and translator. He was a professor emeritus at UBC, where he began his career in 1962, specializing in Polish and East European literature and history. His academic interests as a historian seem to have been shaped by the meanders of his early life. He was born in 1932 on the eastern outskirts of Poland. Deported with his family in 1940 to the Soviet labor camps, he subsequently made his way through Iran and India to postwar Great Britain. Later, he studied modern history in Dublin and Polish and East European literatures in London. His academic work included critical studies of prominent Polish nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets such as Mickiewicz, Norwid, Leśmian, and Miłosz.

In the early sixties he became the editor-in-chief of the Polish émigré periodical Continents. He wrote over thirty articles and chapters in books on modern Polish literature and literary history, and co-wrote two books of translations into English of modern Polish poetry. In Polish, he was the author of Collected Poems (1990), co-author of Poles of Great Britain (1961), and senior editor of Poles in British Columbia (1988). His collected poems, Wiatr z innej strony, were published in 1990 and his more recent poetry volume, Okanagańskie sady, appeared in 1998. In 2002 he published the masterfully edited Anthology of Polish Poetry Abroad, 1939–1999.