Michał Borodo

This article investigates the concept of adaptation in the context of globalization and points to the considerable potential of research into contemporary adaptations. It provides an overview of selected theoretical approaches to the adaptation of children’s literature as well as presents adaptation from a historical perspective. Furthermore, it focuses on selected Disney adaptations of Peter Pan published in Poland at the turn of the 21th century. Of special interest in these Disney adaptations are pictures: identical in different editions, although the accompanying texts differ widely. The visual is thus “recycled,” whereas the textual modifies the style, depiction of characters, use of tenses and culture specific items. The article also introduces the category of glocal adaptations, that is, Disney adaptations retold by Polish verbal masters, such as Jeremi Przybora or Jacek Kaczmarski. Though examples of cultural homogenization, these adaptations are partly indigenized by well-known local figures and may be viewed as glocal texts, where the global and the local overlap.
 

The article focuses on Kaytek the Wizard, the English translation of Janusz Korczak’s children’s classic Kajtuś czarodziej, originally published in Poland in 1933. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book came out in English with the New York-based Penlight Publications in 2012, almost eighty years after the original publication. The article begins with an overview of the theoretical context of translating children’s literature, with regard to issues such as censorship, political correctness, and ideological manipulations. It demonstrates that contentious passages have often been mitigated, in order to create a commercially or ideologically “appropriate” text, for example in the former countries of the Eastern Bloc, in Spain, or in the contemporary United States. It then describes the context of the publication of the English version of Korczak’s novel, shedding light on the roles of the copyright holder and translation commissioner, the publisher and the translator, and also mentioning the English language reviews of the translation in literary journals. Following that, the article examines the translator’s treatment of the original expressions and passages concerning racial issues, which would be considered racist today. These include references to Africans as “savages,” “apes” or “cannibals,” a reflection of the European racial stereotypes of that period. It is demonstrated that, in her treatment of such lexical items, the translator adopted a middle course, retaining some of the contentious passages but also partly omitting and toning down other controversial examples in question. The article also reflects on the role of, and constraints on, the literary translator, who may be confronted with the ethical dilemma of either respecting the integrity of the original, and recreating the collective consciousness of a bygone era, or appropriating the original text, through eliminating passages which negatively portray blacks, so as to better adapt it to the target context of multicultural American society.