UD’s father in law spent four years in Corbu’s atelier just after WW2 – and I mean just after, as in he pretty much traveled directly from Murnau POW camp (where he spent the whole war, having been captured by the Germans early in the conflict) to the Paris studio. UD worked with Jerzy, who wrote the original manuscript in English, on his written English (English was his third or fourth language) in the main essay, which you can find here. (You can find a mistake-free version of the essay in this book.)
One of my happiest memories is sitting on the porch overlooking a pond at Wojciech Fangor’s house one summer, going back and forth with Jerzy, paragraph by paragraph. He had a big broad excitable style with major use of dashes, dot-dot-dots, and exclamation marks; he took all of my editing suggestions in good humor.
Here’s Jerzy’s acknowledgement of our work together.
And here’s his just-released writing about Corbu, translated into Polish:
March 30th, 2021 at 10:43AM
This is delightful. I didn’t know much about “Corbu” biographically but this brings a personality behind his buildings to life.
March 31st, 2021 at 10:08AM
Thanks, Jonathan! I enjoyed wrestling it into shape.