TY - JOUR TI - Between Fidelity and Freedom AU - Bibik, Barbara TI - Between Fidelity and Freedom AB - Ancient playwrights created their plays to be performed on the Athenian stage in the 5th century BC. Within the ensuing centuries, though, their plays were regarded mainly as literary works. Such was the prevailing attitude in the 19th century, when first Polish translations of Greek tragedies were published; it was also very common in the 20th century. However, some translators were aware of the fact that what they translated was not only poetry, but also a material for the stage. Since the Polish theatrical stage differed from the ancient one, a translator of any drama found themselves not only between languages and cultures, but also between stage conventions. That is why their work was always interdisciplinary, it also required inventiveness. But their licence was usually constrained by contemporary literary and theatrical tendencies, and also by the current body of research on antiquity, which was constantly changing. We will never have access to the original idea of those works, but we may try to follow the translator’s work, and try to understand their decisions, their interpretation of a play and the staging potential designed in the final translation, which influences the imagination of readers or spectators. Making use of the necessarily interdisciplinary standpoints as well as selected examples of Polish translations, this paper considers the role of translators in rendering a play from a distant past into the modern world. VL - 2018 IS - Issue 36 – Historia przekładu literackiego 1 PY - 2018 SN - 1425-6851 C1 - 1689-1864 SP - 125 EP - 142 DO - 10.4467/16891864PC.18.007.9549 UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/przekladaniec/article/pomiedzy-wiernoscia-a-wolnoscia KW - Srebrny KW - Greek tragedy KW - prosody KW - stageability KW - Węclewski