Reading Polish Jane Eyre across Centuries

A new book with Brontë-related topics:

Retracing the History of Literary Translation in Poland
People, Politics, Poetics
Edited By Magda Heydel, Zofia Ziemann
Routledge
ISBN: 9780429325366

September 2021

This book, the first of its kind for an English-language audience, introduces a fresh perspective on the Polish literary translation landscape, providing unique insights into the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of Polish translation history.

Employing a problem-based approach, the book creates a map of different research directions in the history of literary translation in Poland, highlighting a holistic perspective on the discipline’s development in the region. The four sections explore topics of particular interest in current translation research, including translation and cultural borderlands, the agency of women translators, translators as intercultural mediators, and the intersection of translation research and digital methods. The 15 contributions demonstrate the ways in which Polish culture has represented translated work in its own way, informed and shaped by socio-political changes in Polish history. At the same time, the volume situates Polish research in translation within the growing body of work on Central and Eastern European translation studies, as well as looking at them against the backdrop of the international development of the discipline.

This collection offers a valuable addition to existing research on Western literary canons, making it key reading for scholars in translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and Slavonic studies.

The book includes the chapter:

My Pale Rusalka, a True Heathen. Reading Polish Jane Eyre across Centuries

by Kasia Szymańska

This chapter traces the meandering story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) in Polish translations, which had been examined as part of the Prismatic Jane Eyre project run by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre. The key questions at stake were the following: firstly, what could different renderings of Jane Eyre in Polish tell us about the history of Polish literary translation? And secondly, to what extent was the ‘strange fate’ of Polish Jane Eyre representative of translation norms and cultural trends in given historical moments? Spanning three different centuries, the five existing Polish translations testify to the shifting political landscape and changing translation norms. Depending on the period, the publishing culture in Poland could favour distinct modes of translation and circulation, including abridged translation, indirect translation, canonisation, or multiplication. While sketching these broader contexts, the following chapter also addresses the issue of how the representation of the woman hinged upon literary genres and aesthetic conventions popular at given times, in particular pagan folklore and Slavic mythology.