Published: 2016
No of Pages: 160
The Boy on the Tricycle
The Boy on the Tricycle – Marcel Weyland’s extraordinary story, describes the three shapers of his life: a beautiful woman, their witch’s castle home and a national epic poem; his life in three continents and his three professions – architecture, law and his multi-award winning English translations of Polish poetry. He describes how he survived World War Two as one of the refugees saved by the Japanese Diplomat, Chiune Sugihara. The memoir is also the tale of a long-lasting love affair which very successfully transcended differences of nationality and religion.
The culture and history against which the story is played out are dominant themes of the memoir, including vignettes of pre-war eastern Europe, pre-war Japan and wartime China, and the post-war innocence of Sydney. Generously illustrated.
About the Author
Marcel Weyland escaped war-time Poland in 1940 and arrived in Australia as a war refugee in 1946. He is an architect with a law degree, and an interpreter and translator of Polish poetry, his previous translations being Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, Echoes – Poems of the Holocaust, The Word: 200 Years of Polish Poetry and Wladyslaw’s Szlengel’s What I Read to the Dead. Recently published is Love, Sex and Death, the poems of Boleslaw Lesmian, all published by Brandl & Schlesinger. He has lectured and given readings extensively in London, Poland, Lithuania, New Zealand and throughout Australia, and been invited to three successive International Congresses of Translators held in Krakow, Poland. He has been awarded the Order of Merit by the Polish Minister of Culture (2005), the medal of the Order of Australia (2008), the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the President of Poland (2012) and the Gold Cross Gloria Artis again by the Minister of Culture (2013).
In 1952 he married artist Phillipa Keane. They live in Sydney Australia and have 5 children, 21 gandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.
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