Right from the beginning of their missionary activity, the Jesuits painstakingly drafted and collected various documents. These accounts were printed in Latin or Italian, and soon translated into other languages. In Poland, in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, more than a dozen reports from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet were printed. They provide first eye-witness accounts from these territories, not only in Poland, but in Europe at large. Polish translations offer material for various kinds of analysis. This article discusses the work of two Polish translators, members of the Society of Jesus, who used different strategies depending on their intended target readership. Szymon Wysocki was interested mainly in religious aspects of the missions to the Far East, and he edited out most of the culture-specific items, as his writing was dedicated to young adepts of the Society. Fryderyk Szembek, on the other hand, paid attention also to cultural aspects of the accounts he translated. However, his attitude towards cultural otherness was less neutral than in the source texts. His translations constituted an important source of knowledge for the seventeenth-century Polish reader. Both translators had to cope with challenges such as proper names or culturally marked vocabulary and with the genre specificity of these texts, which were new to the Polish literary system. In my research, I use the methodological framework of polysystem theory, Lefevere’s theory of rewriting, and Pym’s concepts in the history of translation. I also refer to translation sociology, theory of reportage, history of culture, and history of languages.

The paper focuses on peritexts (Gérard Genette) in Polish Enlightenment translations of three Italian texts: Francesco Algarotti’s novel Il congresso di Citera (1745, 1763; the Polish version ca. 1788), Cesare Beccaria’s treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764; the Polish version 1772) and Giovanni Barberi’s ideological text Compendio della vita, e delle gesta di Giuseppe Balsamo denominato il conte Cagliostro (1791; the Polish version 1793). Their translators: Marianna Maliszewska, Teodor Waga, and Grzegorz Kniażewicz, added a significant amount of their own introductions and notes to the hypertext, which reflected a widespread tendency in  Polish literature, both original and translated, in that period. The information given in the translators’ peritext is analysed here in order to trace manipulation within cultural mediation. The translators take different approaches. Maliszewska’s comments lack the exegetic function, while the observed elements of manipulation may be down to her deficiency in cultural competence and to her low status as a translator. Waga, who uses all kinds of translator’s notes, seems reliable and non-confrontational. His comments are mostly intended to make sure that the text is read according to the author’s intentions and to the Enlightenment outlook. Kniażewicz is the most polemical, partly towards the author of the peritext in the French version of the translated text, which he abuses rather than uses. His peritext definitely indoctrinates the reader and the extent of manipulation in his notes is the largest.

Drawing on the results of research into the scale and distribution of Polish translation activity with regard to the Shakespeare an canon in the 19th century, the article discusses the various roles assumed by both professional and informal editors working with Shakespeare translators over time. Understandably enough, the editorial efforts serve to ensure the quality and reception of the text, and range from publisher’s pressure and copyediting to aesthetic (or societal) patronage and complementary efforts to append the text with critical commentary. The article juxtaposes the intimacy of the  translation process with the inherently intrusive role of an editor, foregrounding the fragile psychological balance which preconditions effective collaboration and longterm commitment. Finally, the article discusses the need for editorial policies attuned to Shakespeare in translation, which would take into account both the literary intricacy of the original(s) and the specificity of retranslation  dialectics, with the necessary positioning of new rewritings against past canon(s).

The paper presents the Polish circulation of Katherine Mansfield’s poem “To Stanislaw Wyspianski” – her only piece of poetry translated into Polish thus far. Written in 1910, the poem was translated three times: by Floryan Sobieniowski in 1910, by Beata Obertyńska in 1958 and by Zbigniew Lisowski in 1968. The analysis of contexts in which the Polish translations were created, published and republished, along with the interpretation of their paratexts, demonstrates that Polish readers and translators were more interested in Wyspiański – the figure presented in the poem – than in Mansfield herself. Throughout decades, very little attention has been paid to the interpretation of the poem. Polish scholars and literary critics rather investigated the circumstances in which Mansfield encountered Polish culture in general and, in particular, learnt about Wyspiański, the great artist from Kraków. Their convictions and beliefs can fruitfully be interpreted by the Translation History scholar as a sign of changes in the cultural and political situation in Poland. Moreover, the translators’ attitude – especially the one presented by Sobieniowski – can successfully be analyzed from the perspective of Translator Studies.

The article focuses on cultural translation and its ethical consequences according to Alicja Iwańska (1918–1996), a Polish sociologist and writer. In her book Świat przetłumaczony [The Translated World] (1968) Iwańska uses the figure of the translator-traitor while trying to translate Mexico conquered by the Spanish to Poland ruined by the Nazis and Stalinists—the book was the literary aftermath of her fieldwork on the culture of the Indian Mazahua of a secluded Mexican village. The scientific aftermath of the same research was her anthropological monograph Purgatory and Utopia. A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico (1971). The first book, written in Polish, was described by the author as “a fictionalised account”, and a “literary output”; the second, written in English, was designed as “relatively free from the interference of extra-scientific emotional elements”. For Alicja Iwańska, before the Second World War a philosophy student under Władysław Tatarkiewicz, translating a culture is an ethical problem; the complex relations between truth, falsity and fiction in intercultural translation are coupled with the issues of expressibility in a specific narrative (literary versus scientific) and a specific language (Polish versus English). Iwańska’s books, read again 50 years after their creation, seem to be a forgotten link of Polish translation theory.

My aim in this article is to present the life and work of Zofia Ernst, nee Kostanecka (1918–1994), a connoisseur of Italian culture and literature and an accomplished translator of Italian books for adults and children. In my argument, I draw on the ethnographic approach, using a common ethnographic tool: the qualitative interview (structured interview) to address important moments and events in Ernst’s life. The focus on the life-story of one translator will help me depict the environment she lived and worked in as well as identify her embedment in particular familial and professional settings which crucially affected her work. I will also discuss Ernst’s formative contribution to the image of Italian literature in Poland in the years 1953–1979, i.e. in the period of her translation activity.

This biographical paper describes Stanisław Barańczak’s first attempts at translating poetry as a high school student in 1964. The aim of the paper is to present the birth of his philological passion, and to answer the question of how Barańczak emerges a translator. The presentation is based on six unpublished translations of Russian and English language poems found in the correspondence of Barańczak and in the hitherto unknown memories of his school friends.
The analysis focuses on the technique of Barańczak’s translation work, on reconstructing his motivations, selection of texts for translation, self-assessment of the results, opinions on the authors of the original and evaluation of pop-culture. In addition, the paper offers several facts from the private life of the teenage translator,
among others the decision to study Polish philology, as well as his relations with his high school colleagues and teachers.

Around 1949 Maria Kuncewiczowa worked on the project of ‘world citizenship’ – a remedy for those writers whom circumstances made stateless. In her view, the category of ‘world citizenship’ allowed to see one’s country from the perspective of the world. She also argued that knowledge of a foreign language was a promising way  f opening up national, regional and doctrinal ‘ghettos’. Following her ideas, the article presents selftranslation as a phenomenon that exceeds one national context and creates a discursive space in which literature denies clear linguistic and cultural borders. After a brief outline of self-translation in the 20th-century Polish literature, the article analyses Kuncewiczowa’s self-translation of the play Thank You for the Rose (1950–1960) and Janusz Głowacki’s assisted self-translation of the play Antygona w Nowym Jorku (1992). In discussing the two case studies, the article pays particular attention to the idea of ‘world citizenship’ in relation to the concept of national literature.