Winifred Katzin

Winifred Katzin (1894-1994) was a translator, author, and publishing director.

Biography

Winnifred appears to have been born , in Cape Town in 1894, the sister of Norah (Norah de la Fere, later of Ludlow, England) and Alfred G. Katzin, a Colonel during World War II and former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, who later settled at Weybridge, England.

Winifred became the second wife of Dr Ernest Gloor (1893-1964) of Lausanne, Switzerland, where she died in 1994.

Her career as translator, compiler and author

She was a talented linguist and a prolific translator and even adaptor - particularly of Eastern European and Yiddish plays. Among her translations over the years have been Failures by Henri-Rene Lenormand (1923), Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1925, translated with Henry G. Alsberg), The Coral by Georg Kaiser (1929), The Passion Play of Alsfeld M. Wall-Neumann (1935).

She also edited and collaborated on a number of play compilations, among them:

Eight European Plays, selected by Winifred Katzin with a preface by Barrett H. Clark (1890-1953), and published by Brentano's, New York, 1927. According to a note in the book "(a)ll of the plays were translated by the compiler, except A Place in the World, which was translated by Miss Katzin and Barrett H. Clark".

Short Plays from Twelve Countries, a collection of English one act plays selected, some translated and adapted, and edited by Winifred Katzin (London: George G Harrap and Co., 1937).

Political publications include As They Are: French Political Portraits (London : W. Heinemann, 1924), Ecoutons-les : problèmes socialistes, positions chrétiennes" (written with her husband and published in Neuchâtel by Ed. de La Baconnière, 1942).

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Her collection of Short Plays from Twelve Countries (1937) contains the text of the South African play In the Drought by J du Plessis.

In South Africa, the Eastern European one-act plays The Jews of Hodos by Sandor Martinescu and Diamond Cuts Diamond by Nikolai Gogol - both translated by Katzin - were performed locally and published (re-published?) as performance texts by DALRO in 1969.

Sources

Adam Yamey. 2004. "A Wedding in Roeland Street", SA-SIG Newsletter (Vol. 4, Issue 3, March 2004): p.6

"Ernest Gloor", Dictionnaire Historiques de la Suisse[1]]

"Katzin, Winifred", WorldCat online catalogue[2]

Obituary: "Alfred G. Katzin, U.N. Ex-Official, 83", New York Times (June 16, 1989: Page 28)[3].

"Winifred Katzin", VIAF: Virtual International Authority File[4]

Jo Mielziner: Other Works, IMDb[5]

Sydney Paul Gosher. 1988. A Historical and Critical Survey of the South African One-Act Play Written in English. Unpublished D.Litt. et Phil. Thesis, University of South Africa.

NELM catalogue.

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