Once Upon a Time There Was a Puss in the Boots: Hanna Januszewska’s Polish Translation and Adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales
The opening of the article examines the history of the reception of fairy tales – in
particular Perrault’s tales – in Poland since 1700; it attempts to explain the reason for
the long established Polish tendency to adapt rather than to translate this kind of literary
works. The introductory presentation is followed by an in-depth comparative analysis
of the fi rst ever Polish translation of Mother Goose Tales by Hanna Januszewska,
published in 1961, and the adaptation of Perrault’s tales made by the same author about
ten years later. The examination focuses on two questions: fi rstly, on the cultural distance
between the original French text and the Polish context of fairy-tales tradition, resulting
in a series of objective translation diffi culties; secondly on the cultural, stylistic and
linguistic shifts introduced by Januszewska to the tales in the process of transforming
her earlier translation into a free adaptation of Perrault’s work. The goal of this scrutiny
is not only to compare originality or literary value of Januszewska’s two proposals,
but also to try to understand the reasons that lie behind the enormous popularity of the
adapted version. The faithful translation, by all means a good text in itself, did not gain
any recognition, and if not exactly a failure, was nevertheless an unsuccessful attempt
to introduce Polish readers to the original spirit of Mother Goose Tales.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Puss in the Boots: Hanna Januszewska’s Polish Translation and Adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales
The opening of the article examines the history of the reception of fairy tales – in
particular Perrault’s tales – in Poland since 1700; it attempts to explain the reason for
the long established Polish tendency to adapt rather than to translate this kind of literary
works. The introductory presentation is followed by an in-depth comparative analysis
of the fi rst ever Polish translation of Mother Goose Tales by Hanna Januszewska,
published in 1961, and the adaptation of Perrault’s tales made by the same author about
ten years later. The examination focuses on two questions: fi rstly, on the cultural distance
between the original French text and the Polish context of fairy-tales tradition, resulting
in a series of objective translation diffi culties; secondly on the cultural, stylistic and
linguistic shifts introduced by Januszewska to the tales in the process of transforming
her earlier translation into a free adaptation of Perrault’s work. The goal of this scrutiny
is not only to compare originality or literary value of Januszewska’s two proposals,
but also to try to understand the reasons that lie behind the enormous popularity of the
adapted version. The faithful translation, by all means a good text in itself, did not gain
any recognition, and if not exactly a failure, was nevertheless an unsuccessful attempt
to introduce Polish readers to the original spirit of Mother Goose Tales.