Ewa Kraskowska

Jean Ward, 2020. The Between-Space of Translation: Literary Sketches, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

 The article is a review of the recent book by Jean Ward on Polish-English literary contacts through translation. The book contains several essays describing specific translation situations. The reviewer appreciates particularly the sensitivity with which the author interprets the texts she chooses in their cultural and metaphysical contexts. She also emphasises the accessibility and personal tone of Jean Ward’s academic writing.

This article is a review of Agnieszka Mrozik’s monograph titled Female Architects of the People’s Republic of Poland: Communist Women, Literature and Women’s Emancipation in Post-War Poland, published in 2023. Consisting of an introduction and seven chapters, each constituting independent wholes linked by a common theme, Mrozik’s work aims to discuss the participation of Polish women of leftist origin and worldview in shaping the political and social reality of the Polish People’s Republic, while also exploring attempts to silence or devalue their activities and achievements in the current Polish discourse on women’s history. The reviewer connects these themes with the experiences of both her own and her parents’ generation, thus drawing on Stuart Tannock’s idea of “nostalgia critique.”

The article recapitulates briefly the history and achievements of Polish feministic criticism in the course of the last two decades, so as to analyze its present condition and immediate future perspectives against this background. According to the authoress, after the period of considerable successes and evident research autonomy, the academic identity of this branch of literary studies, became somewhat obliterated. Feministic criticism operates today as a participant of various alliances and methodological constellations, among others, together with the reflection from under the sign of gender or queer; it also appears together with post-colonial or eco-critical thought, as well as with post-humanism, new historicism or cultural materialism. And although the ease with which it enters into alliances with other cultural discourses in literature studies, obliterates somewhat its formerly sharp and prominent contours, at the same time it provides it with energy which is necessary to exist and generate new projects; at the same time, special emphasis is attached to feministic studies of Polish literature

The article is devoted to the writing and biography of Anna Kowalska. The first part discusses the shared home of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska, in which women hired as housekeepers played a vital role. Then the article briefly analyses Kowalska’s novel Safona (Sappho), which depicts the aging Greek female poet surrounded by her young protégées. The main focus is, however, on the novel Gruce (The Gruca family), co-published in 1936 by Anna Kowalska and her husband, Jerzy Kowalski. The novel was heavily revised by Kowalska and reprinted in 1961, and then in 1968. One of the side motifs of this vast work explores a women’s agricultural cooperative in a village near Lviv in the second half of the 1930s. The utopian projects of feminism and cooperativism are criticised here, while the entire novel fits in the “dark” formula of psychological and social (“populist” in the language of the era) realism, characteristic of that decade.

The article discusses Kinga Rozwadowska’s monograph book Przekład i władza. Polskie tłumaczenia Braci Karamazow Fiodora Dostojewskiego [Translation and Power: Polish Translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov] (Kraków 2018). Before presenting the book, the reviewer refers to translation series as a research problem and discusses elements of retranslation theory. The merit of Rozwadowska’s book lies primarily in its methodological innovativeness: the author combines contemporary cultural discourse on translation with the discourse on power and with Mihail Bakhtin’s concepts of novelistic polyphony and the dialogic word. Moreover, the Rozwadowska discusses and evaluates not only the translation series, but also the current situation of the examined translations on Polish publishing market. The adoption of a cultural perspective does not entail abandoning traditional translation analysis based on philological examination and comparison of textual material. This procedure is successfully applied in the second part of the monograph, devoted to ten selected elements of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which illustrates specific translation problems. The comparative analyses and interpretations of individual elements of the translation series are also evaluated highly by the reviewer, although not without minor polemical remarks.