Polish Women Translators Outside the Canon. On a Forgotten Translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils

Despite the growing interest in women’s writing, women translators and their achievements are rarely discussed. The article focuses on mechanisms behind the exclusion of women’s writing from literary history and examines the social status of three women translators as contributing to their invisibility. Dora Gabe, Slava Shtiplieva and Anastasia Gancheva were co-workers at Polish-Bulgarian Review. Each developed a different strategy to cope with the unfavorable intellectual climate of interwar Bulgaria. Their biographies show the connections between marital and social status of a woman writer and the esteem of her works. They also confirm the claim that translating, instead of writing, was thought to be more appropriate for women because of the low position translation occupied in the hierarchy of artistic occupations.

Polish Women Translators Outside the Canon. On a Forgotten Translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils

Despite the growing interest in women’s writing, women translators and their achievements are rarely discussed. The article focuses on mechanisms behind the exclusion of women’s writing from literary history and examines the social status of three women translators as contributing to their invisibility. Dora Gabe, Slava Shtiplieva and Anastasia Gancheva were co-workers at Polish-Bulgarian Review. Each developed a different strategy to cope with the unfavorable intellectual climate of interwar Bulgaria. Their biographies show the connections between marital and social status of a woman writer and the esteem of her works. They also confirm the claim that translating, instead of writing, was thought to be more appropriate for women because of the low position translation occupied in the hierarchy of artistic occupations.