Xavier Chantry

This article discusses sex education books for children and young adults published in Poland between 1945 and 2018. After defining the ideological profile of 111 examined publications as either conservative, moderately conservative, neutral, moderately liberal or liberal, the authors compare the whole set of translated books (translations) with the whole set of books by Polish authors (non-translations), taking into account the date of publication and the age of the intended reader. The analysis shows that translations differ from texts written originally in Polish, because they promote other values. Polish books, especially those published before 1989, are usually neutral or moderately conservative, while translations mostly propagate moderately liberal or liberal ideologies. There is also a close correlation between those ideological categories and the age of the reader: books for the youngest audience are ideologically charged to only a small degree, and the ideological content increases with the age of the reader. This seems to be related to the larger number of translations in the older age groups. Translations, which usually reflect a liberal ideology, fill a gap in Polish culture by complementing or replacing the conservative sex education available in Polish schools, and by encouraging Polish authors to write sex education books expressing similar views.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.009.13172.

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and “elite” literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of “social document”, which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader’s knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: “shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach”? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, “under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society”, the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the “encyclopaedic” knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski – his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur’s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator’s project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry