First Secretary Gierek, President Carter, and the president’s Polish interpreter: An analysis of an awkward diplomatic encounter based on new archival evidence

Abstract

President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Poland (29–31 December 1977) was the first stop on a nine-day long foreign trip that also took Carter to Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, France, and Belgium. This was Carter’s first and only presidential visit to a nation in the Soviet bloc and his first personal encounter with a leader of a Communist government. His host, Edward Gierek, first secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) in 1970–1980, was a more experienced statesman who had already received the first sitting U.S. President to come to Poland, Richard Nixon (1972), and Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford (1975). But this was the last highlight of Gierek’s détente with the U.S. At the time of Carter’s visit, Poland was facing serious economic problems. In a couple of years, the Solidarity labor union would be born, and Gierek would be removed from power. The next U.S. President would arrive in July 1989 to face a completely different nation.<p>

<p>By all accounts, this was an important visit. It also stands out among other diplomatic encounters of the time because of the media focus on Carter’s Polish interpreter, who allegedly made embarrassing mistakes at the welcoming ceremony at the airport on the evening of 29 December 1977. American journalists, who did not know Polish, learned about those errors from hearsay and provided their readers with a variety of outrageous versions, which have survived to this day and are taken for granted by historians of the Carter presidency (Eizenstat 2018, 604). Generations of professional interpreters have turned the episode into a cautionary tale, sometimes embellishing it with their own biases and Schadenfreude. The president himself was more forgiving than many of Seymour’s colleagues, putting in his diary: “In my arrival ceremony statement, we discovered later that we had an interpreter who used outmoded Polish words and phrases and something of a Russian syntax. We changed the interpreter after that.” In his opinion, this was not detrimental to Carter’s mission: “The entire visit was delightful” (Carter 2010, 155).<p>

<p>I was recently able to obtain an archival audio file of the whole episode (Remarks of the President at Arrival 1977) and a separate silent video file with its partial footage (President Jimmy Carter European Summit Meetings 1977–1978) from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. The Appendix to this article includes both original and translated versions of Carter’s remarks, which I transcribed from the audio file. Seymour’s version of Carter’s remarks has never been published before. The official translation of Carter’s remarks offered by the Polish press (Gierek and Carter 1977–1978, 2) did not use Seymour’s version. Although some fragments appeared in a Radio Free Europe broadcast (Orzeł Biały – Na Antenie 1978, 18), other existing Polish accounts of the episode rely solely on a reverse translation of Seymour’s alleged mistakes from English (Gostkiewicz 2017; Szulc 2017).<p>

<p>The silent video file, although it focuses on interpreters only on rare occasions, provides glimpses into Seymour’s work style and positioning. Another major source of my study that was almost untapped before (apart from Teschner 1978) is the U.S. newspapers of the period, which I identified with the help of the Library of Congress E-Resources Online Catalog.<p>

<p>These materials show that a lot of the media criticism was unfair towards the interpreter and ought to be explained by purely political factors. My analysis contains some lessons for diplomatic interpreters and contributes an interesting case study to recent theoretical discussions about various modes of interpreting (consecutive and sentence-by-sentence interpreting and sight translation). At the same time, it draws attention to the diplomatic interpreter’s vulnerable position. In some memoirs of high-level interpreters, they always come across as incredibly resourceful and utterly competent. Their efforts at self-aggrandizement, as one student of such texts has suggested, may be a coping mechanism to deal with the unfortunate fact that they tend to have a lower status in the hierarchy and are invisible (or “semi-visible”) to the public (Rogatchevski 2019, 459–461; see also Anders 2002, 50–55). They can still achieve true global visibility and international fame – but only when things go hopelessly wrong.<p>

<p>The paper consists of three main sections: first, I describe the welcoming ceremony, discuss Seymour’s choice of interpreting mode and the problems inherent to this mode, and provide information on his preparation and training; second, I analyze my transcript of Seymour’s Polish phrases and classify his errors and inaccuracies; third, I discuss the exaggerated claims by the media and interpreting community and try to reveal the reasons for those exaggerations. The “epilogue” outlines Seymour’s interpreting career after the Warsaw episode, and the Appendix contains my transcription of Carter’s remarks at the airport, both in their original and interpreted versions.