Adriana Kovacheva

Despite the growing interest in women’s writing, women translators and their achievements are rarely discussed. The article focuses on mechanisms behind the exclusion of women’s writing from literary history. It examines the social status of three women translators and demonstrates how their social position contributed to their invisibility. Dora Gabe, Slava Shtiplieva and Anastasia Gancheva were co-workers at The Polish-Bulgarian Review. Each developed a different strategy to cope with the unfavourable intellectual climate of interwar Bulgaria. Their biographies show an interdependence between the marital and social status of a woman writer and the esteem of her literary output. They also confi rm the claim that translating was thought to be a more appropriate artistic occupation for women because of its lower status than that of writing

Found in Translation. Dora Gabe, Sława Sztiplijewa and Anastasija Ganczewa as Editors od "Polish-Bulgarian Review"

Despite the growing interest in women’s writing, women translators and their achievements are rarely discussed. The article focuses on mechanisms behind the exclusion of women’s writing from literary history and examines the social status of three women translators as contributing to their invisibility. Dora Gabe, Slava Shtiplieva and Anastasia Gancheva were co-workers at Polish-Bulgarian Review. Each developed a different strategy to cope with the unfavorable intellectual climate of interwar Bulgaria. Their biographies show the connections between marital and social status of a woman writer and the esteem of her works. They also confirm the claim that translating, instead of writing, was thought to be more appropriate for women because of the low position translation occupied in the hierarchy of artistic occupations.

Sincerity and Autothematism. The Case of Two Journalistic Texts by Wilhelm Mach

In the present article I examine in detail two journalistic texts by the Polish writer Wilhelm Mach. The main concern of the analysis is Mach’s implicit anxiety to be sincere. I am arguing here that the requirement for sincerity is intricately connected with the political atmosphere of the Thaw period in Poland, which began after Stalin’s death. I put forward the thesis that Mach’s positive validation of sincerity influences his programmatic metafiction and constitutes a reaction to the political situation. At the same time, reading the writer’s proposals against the background of the then-popular Soviet philosopher Vladimir Pamerancev’s ideas, I demonstrate that Mach is not convinced by the model of subjectivity behind the idea of honesty promoted at the time. His awareness of the role of literary conventions leads him to ironic subversion of the idea of directness and sincerity in literature.