Ursula K. Le Guin was an American writer, a master of science fiction and fantasy. She was the author of the famous Earthsea trilogy, in which magic remains the pivotal idea. In the novels, Le Guin links immense, yet dangerous, supernatural abilities with the idea of Equlibrium within realms, a principle that governs the universe. The paper is an attempt to elucidate how certain visions of life after death are constellated within Le Guin’s fantasy writings. Visibly inspired by Eastern mythologies and religious doctrines, the author does not steer clear from the vision rooted in Western traditions. The ongoing debate is an attempt at clarifying the universal concept of soul and mankind.

Józef Birkenmajer (1897–1939) was literary scholar and translator from classical and modern languages. He formulated the concept of ‘co-creative translation’, which assumes that the translator and the author of the original text enjoy the same status of creators. Although he translated a host of English novels, what he liked most was highly rhythmic verse, a preference not hard to detect in the list of his publications. His translations of Rudyard Kipling belong to the classics of the genre. By giving full attention to the poems and rhyming couples in Kipling's stories, Birkenmajer pioneered the notion of integral translation. His habit of lacing his journalism and other forms of writing with memorable verses from Kipling's books led many Polish readers to see Kipling primarily as a poet. Birkenmajer was also a translator of the poems and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, on whose ‘Raven’ he worked in late 1937/early 1938 (it was eventually published in April 1938). While his experiments with obsolete vocabulary and dialect words were on the whole unsuccessful, many of his translations continue to spellbind new generations of readers.