Considering the Polish translations of three selected short stories by Rudyard Kipling the author reflects on the translation of the ironic figures that appear in the texts. Using the Mateo’s typology of the translator’s choices while facing the irony (1995) the author tries to show the role of this rhetorical device in the wider, cultural and historical context. The Polish translators’ way of interpreting irony that appears in the colonial fiction in the early 20-th century seems to be determined by their ability of understanding the British Empire social problems as well as their sensitivity to the distinctive British humor and their knowledge of colonial life realities. Among the analysed short stories one can find Georgie Porgie, 1888 (translated by Feliks Chwalibóg ,1909), The Limitations of Pambe Serang, 1889 (Feliks Chwalibóg, 1910) and The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, 1885 (unknown translator, 1900).

Polish translator Wladyslaw Orkan was one of the greatest popularizers of Ukrainian literature in Poland at the turn of the 19th century. He translated and edited the selection of Ukrainian novellas Mloda Ukraina, published in 1908. Ukrainian motives also constituted a significant element of his own texts (Kostka Napierski 1925).

The paper discusses translations and metatexts (prefaces, introductions) by Władysław Orkan in the context of postcolonial criticism. Numerous texts describing Polish-Ukrainian relations have shown essential post-colonial legacy recognizable in Polish literature taking up topics related to Ukraine (see. esp. Skórczewski 2013, Bakuła 2014). The use of that theory in analysis of Orkan’s translations, therefore, seems justified.

Orkan’s strategies in translation were influenced his personality and the need to “defend” Ukrainian literature in Poland. In his original work, Orkan felt a bit lonely because he was one of the first Polish writers of peasant origin who wrote about rural life and presented values hitherto absent from Polish literature.

By raising Ukrainian literature to the status of national literature, Orkan proved that there was separate national Ukrainian culture. Accordingly, he may be said to have de-colonized Ukraine for the Polish reader.

The aim of this article is to take a closer look at reviews of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto published in Polish press and study its recepion. Informations which can be found in reviews enable to gather not only facts about the translation quality, but also to define an attitude that the target culture has towards the translated literature. In the case that we chose to study we face the literature from the former Portuguese colony, Mozambique, which enters the Polish literary system via the ex metropoly, that is, Portugal. The transfer of the work takes place in the field of literary systems that are seen as peripheral, which produces a very interesting situation in a world of postcolonial order. In order to legitimize our conclusions, we chose to execute this analysis in a wider context of Mozambican Literature, taking under our consideration the analysis of the Sleepwalking Land novel as well, and the Polish context, which accepts in its literary system a work that is seen as an exotic one. As the factors defining the reception we point out the existing paratexts, translator's explanations and the position that Mia Couto has in Polish literary system before 2010, the date that Sleepwalking Land was published in Poland.

It is clear that in 2017, 25 years after Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize for Literature and over a decade after V.S. Naipaul’s accolade, the observation of Montserratian E. A. Markham (2001) that Caribbean authors “no longer have to put the old case that the[ir] work is invisibilised” (13) seems even more justified than in 1989 when it was originally made. However, Caribbean literature is still under-represented in Eastern Europe, an error of exclusion that the present paper ventures to discuss.

For decades Polish publishers have been understandably replicating metropolitan canons, zig-zagging between European and American bestsellers. It is only when a Caribbean or Caribbean-British writer gains an international distinction (Walcott, Naipaul) or becomes a worldwide publishing sensation (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy) that their books are translated. Exceptions to this rule, such as the solitary Polish editions of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (Muza, 2006), Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Nasza Księgarnia, 2011) and Kei Miller's The Last Warner Woman (Świat Książki, 2012), or single Francophone Caribbean novels, are few and far between.

 Arguably, it seems that this politics of translation and publishing stems from the systemic, colonially foisted peripherality of West Indian literature, its being sidelined by the cultural production of the UK as well as the USA, which in turn dominates the curricula of English departments in more culturally homogeneous countries such as Poland. However, what constitutes a major problem for the dissemination (and popularity) of Caribbean Creole literature in Polish is exactly what makes West Indian writing so engaging, multi-layered, polyphonous and intertextual – it is the cultural component (for instance, the translation of “Creole folkways”) that is often misread, misconstrued and, as a consequence, mis-rendered. For that reason, using a number of literary sources, the present paper will attempt to showcase a selection of translatological strategies of coping with, to quote Benjamin Zephaniah, “decipher[ing]/de dread chant” into Polish.

When a work of European literature is translated into Arabic, the language of a predominantly Islamic culture, terms referring to Arabs as a people or Muslims as a religious community, the name of Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, etcetera, cease to be foreign and exotic and become local and familiar. The present analysis of contemporary Arabic translations of Dante’s Divine comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quijote and Scott’s Ivanhoe shows that these elements are not always simply returned to their native culture if the original text represents them in a negative, Eurocentric way, which can even be considered blasphemous by Muslims if religious content is involved but are subject to more or less significant transformations that are ideologically motivated. Instead of straightforward restitution to the native culture, what takes place is a kind of annexation of texts which consists in replacing the negatively portrayed ‘Other’ by a positively, or at least neutrally, represented ‘We’. Such manipulations may be explicit, i.e. signalled in footnotes, or tacit. In some cases, anti-Islamic passages become even sympathetic towards Islam when translated into Arabic. In this way the authors of Arabic translations liberate the texts from the dominating Western perspective and adapt them to their own vision of the world. What seems to be manipulation and censorship from the ‘Western’ point of view may be perceived in an entirely different manner inside the Arabo-Islamic culture, for instance as correction of obvious factual errors.

The author proposes a new critical model of translation analysis: the method is based on translation tropics – an idea by Douglas Robinson presented in his book Translator’s Turn – but it has been vastly modified and extended. Five tropes (irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis) describe five types of translators and their affective motivations for translational decision making: translator’s affects toward the Other of the source text and culture. The article offers deeper insight into one of the tropes, i.e. metonymy. The analytical part presenting a practical gain from this theoretical tool is based on alphabetical translations of Charles Bernstein’s work made by Peter Waterhouse and his VERSATORIUM group. 

Amerykańskie powojnie Czesława Miłosza[The American postwar of Czesław Miłosz’s] is a book based on Ewa Kołodziejczyk's research in Yale library, where she found some rare articles, which Milosz had written while his first stay in US as Polish communists’ representative. Kolodziejczyk splits Milosz’s activites into diplomatic, popularizing, and literary ones. Her main concept is “the telescopic eye”. It lets her tie all the Milosz’s interests while his stay in US. Also, such concept emphasizes Milosz’s rapacity towards the world as a whole. Thanks to that, Kolodziejczyk is able to create a coherent, convincing narration of short, but crucial Milosz’s episode in late 40s.