Eliza Pieciul-Karmińska

The article discusses difficulties with translating Grimms’ fairy tales into Polish. The first part describes the specific features of the original text and presents Bruno Bettelheim’s conclusions about “the meaning and importance of fairy tales.” The second part reviews the existing Polish translations. The third part discusses the main goals of a new Polish translation. The conclusion stresses that the new Polish translation should be addressed to a double audience (both children and adults), as is the case with the original Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

This article discusses adaptation of children’s literature as illustrated by the Polish translation series of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s world-famous story The Nutcracker. The fi rst part is a review of the eight Polish versions of the German original. The second part identifi es “vulnerable” places of the original text, that is, dimensions which undergo changes in the process of adaptation because of translators’ perceptions of children’s abilities and emotional needs. In conclusions the author claims that various adaptation strategies reveal assumptions of (adult) translators about (young) readers (presented here in the form of ten commandments how [not] to translate for children).

This article presents a pre-war translation series of the fantastic tale The strange child (Das fremde Kind) by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a work published in 1817 and soon translated into many European languages. Unluckily, Hoffmann’s story, one of the two internationally best known examples of fantasy tales (the other one is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) is practically inexistent in the Polish literature. The article is an attempt to discover why an internationally acknowledged children’s story remains unknown in Poland (in opposition to Hoffmann’s other children’s tale Nutcracker). One of the reasons is the specific ‘fantastic’ character of Hoffmann’s work, but other reasons must be sought in the qualities of both pre-war translations in Polish (1923 and 1926). The article concentrates on discovering translation strategies used in those renditions and their consequences for the Polish reception.