Jan Rybicki

The article is about the friendship and social activity of two important female representatives of the Polish emancipation movement at the turn of the 19th century: Aleksandra Bąkowska, aristocrat and owner of the Gołotczyzna estate as well as translator of early American anthropological works, and Paulina Kuczalska- Reinschmit, impoverished noblewoman, leader of the suffragist movement in the Polish Kingdom. Both women were inspired by the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, the researcher of the Iroquois culture and the author of, among others, Ancient Society (1877), in which he described and compared different systems of kinship in pre- and non-Christian cultures. Bąkowska translated this book into Polish in 1887, which triggered a discussion among early Polish sociologists, anthropologists and cultural philosophers, most importantly about the issue of the historicity of the institution of monogamian marriage and patriarchal family. Bąkowska turned a part of the Gołotczyzna estate into a school for country girls founded on the principles resembling the communist community of rights and obligations as described by L.H. Morgan based on the observation of Indian tribes. Kuczalska-Reinschmit, on the other hand, established the Polish Women Emancipation Association in Warsaw, whose seat – with a reading room, a lending library, a lecture hall – was also organized as a community, mainly for women. Both initiatives led to the dissemination of emancipation ideas in the Polish Kingdom before WWI and contributed to the principle of equality of rights for men and women inscribed in the new Polish constitution of 1918.

In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between the frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary texts in English, French and Polish.

The success rate of authorship attribution by multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies is studied in a 1000-novel corpus of Polish literary works from the late 18th to the early 21st century. The results are examined for possible influences of the number of authors and/or the number of texts to be attributed. Also, the success rates achieved in this study are compared to those obtained in earlier studies for smaller corpora, too small perhaps to produce regular patterns. This study shows that text sets of this size confirm the intuitive predictions as to those influences: 1) the more authors, the less successful attribution; 2) for the same number of authors, the number of texts to be attributed does not influence success rate.

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well..

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was also Alma, who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This article investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin’s significantly affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations.