Wstęp do czternastego numeru czasopisma.

The article highlights the important role of Lucia Merecka Borski, the most active translator of Polish fairy tales into English in the 20th century. Situated within the field of Translator Studies, it poses such questions as: why do translators translate, why do they translate some texts and not others, what motivates them to do
so, and how to interpret their translation choices? Addressing these questions, the article discusses Merecka Borski’s The Jolly Tailor and Other Fairy Tales, repeatedly reprinted in the United States. The text pays special attention to the translation of Polish proper names as well as the cultural and institutional context influencing Merecka Borski’s translation activities.

Understanding adaptation as a two-way process in which the original medium and the medium of adaptation interact with each other, the paper analyzes the relationship between the fairy tale The Star-Child by Oscar Wilde and the puppet play The Star-Child by the Zadar Puppet Theater, directed and adapted by Milena Dundov. The two works are connected by a series of common elements that they approach and use in some places similarly, but more often differently. The key point of difference, in addition to the differences in the media, is the temporal, spatial and especially social context in which the fairy tale and the puppet show were created. The paper analyzes the similarities and, particularly, the differences between the two works, and attempts to notice the second part of the two-way influence — the adaptation’s influence on the source.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problem of reception of Slovenian children’s literature in Poland between 1990 and 2020. The author notices the fact that Polish translations of Slovenian children’s prose are very rare on the Polish book market. The author notices a complete lack of Polish translations of Slovenian children’s literature in the years 1990—2010, which was caused probably by societal and cultural factors, which changed after 2010.

The publishing house Afera was established on the initiative of Julia Różewicz in Wrocław in 2010. The main goal of the publishing house is to introduce new Czech books to the Polish market. The Wrocław publishing house offers the Czech Fairy Tale series, within which ten positions of Czech literature for children and young people have been published. In the paper, we will consider how the Czech Fairy Tale series influences the shaping of the image of Czech literature for children and young people in Poland.

The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of violence in Polish translations of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Du Maurier’s novel has been translated into Polish twice, by Wanda Wasilewska in 1939 and by Eleonora Romanowicz-Podoska in 1958. Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup focuses on selected passages, i.e., scenes which depict violence. These scenes are private encounters between Mrs Danvers, a villain, and Max de Winter’s second wife. An attempt is made to assess how Polish translators have conveyed the novel’s depictions of violence in terms of the strategies and techniques used in translation.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the English translation of Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną by Dorota Masłowska, published in Poland in 2002. The inquiry is situated in the context of the postcolonial theory of translation and is conducted from the perspective of the receiving culture. The research reveals that Benjamin Paloff, in the process of translation, favoured domestication over the foreignization strategy, which caused partial obliteration of the source culture in the translated text.

The paper examines difficulties in translating meaningful (allusive) proper names and selected paratexts in the novel S.N.U.F.F. by Victor Pelevin. The chosen exemplification material shows the multi-dimensionality of Victor Pelevin’s prose and the resulting translation problems. Translation is transferring a text from one intertextual and cultural space to another. For this reason, it inevitably results in a loss of some intertextual references and a gain of new ones.

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in the personality of the translators and the role they play in the translation process. One of the ways to overcome the ‘invisibility’ of the translators is to explore the peritexts inherent in the translated work. In the context of Polish-Slovak translations, the literary scholar and translator Jozef Hvišč has left a very distinctive mark in the form of an afterword. He is the author of the afterword in all his translations of Polish literature into Slovak, as well as in editions of numerous works by other translators. His erudite peritexts consider translated works in a historical and critical literary context. They demonstrate the reasons why the books were published in translation and enrich the receiving culture.

The author examines the reconstruction of digressions and intertextual references comparing the poem Polish Flowers by Julian Tuwim and its Russian translation. She draws attention to numerous “gaps” — omissions visible in the translation. She notes that they are the opposite of “enroic gaps” (the term coined by Henryk Lebiedziński), which made it possible to guess the omitted content (message). Hence, she introduces the term “non-enroic gaps”. As a result, she comes to the conclusion that the digressiveness of the Polish work has been lost in the translation, for which these “gaps” are to blame.

The paper deals with the relationships between the formal regularity in translated poems and their semantics. The author advocates the thesis that the most often used method by translators is replacing non-metaphorical and metaphorical expressions by to some extent equivalent forms of metonymy and synecdoche. This technique makes it possible to reconstruct the rhythm and rhyme of the original text. This claim is illustrated by fragments of Polish poems translated into Russian, Russian/English texts and their Polish/Russian equivalents.

The article concentrates on the phenomenon of Slovak lyrical prose, which was developing in Slovak literature in the interwar period of the 20th century. The author of the article is interested in how this prose functions in Polish translations. The considerations presented in the article focus on the aspect of translating this prose into Polish, the possibilities of translation, translation problems related to the act of translating modernism and avant-garde elements. The author is interested in the changing artistic criteria of translators over time, their translation choices and transformations in translation, the final effect of the act of translation.

Poets of second wave modernism in Croatian literature, and especially the generation of Krugovi journal poets, open up through translations from other literatures. There has been much talk about the importance of Anglo-Saxon translations penned by Antun Šoljan, Ivan Slamnig, and others, but it is also the generation that opened up to translations of Romance literatures. Translations from Romance literatures (especially Italian literature, and to a lesser extent Spanish) were viewed, due to post-war ideological and political circumstances, as somewhat subversive. However, with the appearance of the journal Krugovi (1952), translations of Italian, Spanish, and French literature experience a new boom. In this paper, I will examine the translation work of poet and editor of Krugovi, Nikola Milićević, and his translations of Spanish poets.

The article presents considerations on the role and activities of the translator in a Polish-Slovenian intercultural dialogue. In addition to translating works, translators from peripheral languages engage (to a greater or lesser extent) in various translation-related activities. This also applies to translators of Slovenian literature in Poland. Their role as cultural intermediaries, ambassadors, animators and literary agents becomes important. The article uses the theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which is helpful in describing the complex interaction of various social and cultural realities.