A translation into Polish of Catullus’ poem 70.

A review of the new Polish translation of Ovid’s Heroides by Elżbieta Wesołowska and Monika Miazek-Męczyńska.

A review of a new Polish translation of Aristophanes’ Clouds by Olga Śmiechowicz.

A review of the Chronicle of the Princes of Poland, translated and edited by Jerzy Wojtczak‑Szyszkowski. The Chronicle, composed in the fourteenth century by an unknown author, presents the history of the house of Piast and belongs to the most important sources of mediaeval Polish history, in particular the history of Silesia.

A response to the review of a new Polish translation of Aristophanes’ Clouds, which appeared in the previous issue of “Meander”.

A Polish translation of Cicero’s letter to Nigidius Figulus (Ad Fam. IV 13).

This paper analyses four Polish renditions of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (first part of the trilogy Oresteia) – by Zygmunt Węclewski, Jan Kasprowicz, Stefan Srebrny, and Artur Sandauer – and attempts to trace in particular the manner in which the translators approach and portray Clytemnestra, an ambiguous and complicated figure, who exceeds the social frames within which she lives. A comparison of the four translations with the Greek text uncovers the different strategies chosen by the translators which, in turn, point to their reading of the play.

A Polish translation of Book 10 of Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, whose climactic part treats the deaths of Paris and Oenone. This foreshadows the first Polish translation of the whole of Quintus’ poem since the rendering by Jacek Idzi Przybylski published in Cracow in 1815.

Since the adoption of Christianity in Poland, the Bible has actively shaped the culture and religiousness of the Polish people. Translations of the Bible into the Polish language, as was the case with translations into national languages in other countries, counted among the most important areas of writing. Appearing as early as the Middle Ages, they mainly covered the Book of Psalms (St. Florian's Psalter, the Pulawy Psalter, and the Cracow Psalter). The first translations of the entire Holy Bible into Polish were the Catholic Leopolita Bible and the Protestant Brest Bible. The Wujek Bible, published in Cracow in 1599, exerted the broadest and most powerful influence, defining the Polish culture and biblical language, and was effectively superseded with the publication of the Millennium Bible (1965). For the Protestants, the Brest Bible was replaced by the Gdansk Bible, which remained in use until as late as 1975, when the Warsaw Bible appeared. Today, the Millennium Bible plays the role of the Polish Bible, although it profoundly lacks the authority and impact of the Wujek Bible. For its influence to become comparable to that of the Wujek Bible, it would have to become a reference translation, and the five consecutive editions have hardly reinforced its position.

The paper concerns biblical heritage in Polish medieval and early modern literature. In it's first section the author presents the first Polish psalters and their influence upon religious poetry of the time. The second part focuses on the development of biblical scholarship in medieval and Renaissance Poland, presents the most important old translations of the Bible and shortly discusses their impact on Polish literary culture. The last part of the study shows how various types of biblical plots and characters were present in old Polish drama and theatre, in religious hymns and epics, how biblical patterns inspired certain literary genres; it also stresses cer- tain significant differences between Protestant and Catholic authors of the time. The conclusion of the paper points out serious need for more systematic researches and studies in the subject of biblical tradition in old Polish literature.

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.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (1908) enjoys unprecedented popularity in Poland and has played a considerable role in the shaping of modern Polish culture. As many as fourteen different translations of the fi rst volume of the series have been published; moreover, there exists an active Polish fandom of Montgomery’s oeuvre. The authors of this article briefly discuss the cultural and social aspects of this phenomenon which was triggered off in 1911 by Rozalia Bernsteinowa’s Polish translation of Anne of Green Gables. Her translation, still regarded as the canonical text, greatly altered the realities of the original novel. As a result, in Poland Anne of Green Gables has the status of a children’s classic, whereas readers in the English-speaking world have always treated it as an example of the sub-genre of juvenile college (school) girls’ literature. The identity of the Polish translator of L.M. Montgomery’s book remains a mystery, and even the name on the cover may well be pen name (though, at any rate, it strongly suggests that she must have belonged to the Jewish intelligentsia of the early 20th century). What we do know about her for fact is that she was a translator of German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and English literature. Comparing Rozalia Bernsteinowa’s Polish text to its English original has been a subject of many Polish B.A. and M.A. theses. The argument of this article is that her key reference for was not the English text, but that of the fi rst Swedish translation by Karin Jensen named Anne på Grönkulla (1909).