The aim of this article is to explore the problem of rendering contemporary literary depictions of Scottishness in Polish. One of the most important aspects of late 20th- and 21st-century Scottish prose is the formation and preservation of national identity as distinct from what we tend to view as Britishness (which many – and certainly many Scots – consider synonymous with Englishness). This self-building is done though narratives that make extensive use of culture-specific items, but especially language – primarily English, but different from the standard, heterogeneous, often dialectally marked, drawing from Scots, and characterised by an internal tension that has to do with the paradoxical predicament of contemporary Scottish authors: a predicament which involves writing against the language that they themselves use in their work, countering the Britishness which they are, after all, a part of. The example of Scotland thus complicates our perception of English as an obviously dominant language and especially as a linguistic monolith, stable and uniform. Drawing from the postcolonial thought of Maria Tymoczko, Michael Cronin and Gayatri Spivak, this article offers an overview of selected works of important contemporary Scottish writers – James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Denise Mina and Douglas Stuart – and their translations into Polish, authored by Jolanta Kozak, Jędrzej Polak, Hanna Pawlikowska-Gannon, Maciej Świerkocki, Krzysztof Cieślik and Maciej Studencki. This overview seeks to shed light on Scottish identity as a cultural and especially linguistic phenomenon, explore how it is rendered in Polish translations and reflect on what implications these renditions have for our understanding of Scottishness, but also Britishness at large.
