Folia Orientalia (FOr) is an international multi- and interdisciplinary journal published annually by the Commission of Oriental Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Kraków Branch). It represents a broad range of Oriental Studies, especially linguistic, literary, historical, archaeological, cultural, religious and art history issues, mainly from the Near and Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia and Africa.
The peer-reviewed journal Folia Orientalia was founded in 1959 by Tadeusz Lewicki, an eminent Polish Arabist, who noticed the desirability of creating a new yearbook with a broad spectrum of studies devoted to cultures and civilisations of Asia and Africa. Lewicki served as chairman of the editorial board (1959–1968, 1971–1976) and as editor (1980–1986). Earlier, in the years 1959–1979, the post of editor was held by Franciszek Machalski, Iranologist. Subsequent editors were Stanisław Stachowski, Turkologist (1987–2002), Andrzej Zaborski, Arabist and specialist in comparative linguistics of Semitic-African languages (2003–2014), and Tomasz Polański, an archaeologist and philologist, specialist in Hellenistic studies (2015–2021). Since 2022, the position of editor has been held jointly by Maciej Klimiuk (Free University of Berlin, Heidelberg University) and Arkadiusz Płonka (Jagiellonian University in Kraków).
We invite you to submit articles, review articles and book reviews that fit within the aims and scope of our journal. Each article is subject to rigorous double-blind peer review. From 2022 onwards, we accept articles in English, French or German.
Copyright on any open access article in the Folia Orientalia journal published by Polish Academy of Sciences is retained by the author(s). Authors grant Polish Academy of Sciences a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any user the right to use the article freely if its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified. The Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 formalizes these and other terms and conditions of publishing articles.
This study offers a detailed re-examination of a passage from the second fargard of the Pahlavi Vidēvdād (Vd. 2.6), which recounts the episode of Yima receiving two mysterious implements from Ahura Mazda. The paper analyses the Avestan and Middle Persian terminology (suβrā-, aštrā-, sūrāgōmand, aštar), the interpretative challenges they pose, and their various renderings in past scholarship. It argues that the aforementioned passage of the Vīdēvdād has been frequently misinterpreted due to insufficient attention to the Middle Persian zand and—in one case—to the heterographic structure of the Pahlavi text. The study identifies the term mtl’k as an overlooked aramaeogram corresponding to pēsīdag (‘gilt, adorned’), thus clarifying the phrase pēsīdag dastag (‘with a gilt handle’). Drawing on philological, textual, and comparative evidence, the article concludes that the two objects in question should be interpreted not as weapons or musical instruments but as pastoral tools—specifically, a goad and a whip—fitting Yima’s function as a herdsman-king. The analysis also situates the narrative within broader Iranian ritual and mythological traditions, including parallels with Herodotus’ account of Xerxes’ ritual acts at the Hellespont.
This article analyses the battle descriptions in the Mahābhārata from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, focusing on how the epic’s oral character shapes its linguistic and narrative structure. Drawing on the author’s experience as a translator of Sanskrit into Polish, the study explores the relationship between word order and viewpoint construal, showing how syntactic strategies guide the listener’s imagination and evoke emotional responses. Using a passage from Book VI, the analysis demonstrates how shifts in prominence and perspective—expressed through zooming in and out—create a dynamic interplay between proximity and distance, slowing down or accelerating narrative time. These changes enable the audience to experience the battle both as spectacle and as tragedy. The article argues that the Mahābhārata’s orality fosters an imagery-oriented mode of storytelling, in which grammar itself becomes a tool of visualisation. A comparison with Alex Cherniak’s English translation highlights how the constraints of English syntax can obscure these cognitive effects, raising broader questions about the limits of translation when it comes to rendering construal and viewpoint.
This article offers a series of reflections on the author’s experience translating extensive portions of the Mahābhārata into Polish, with particular attention to metrical challenges encountered in rendering Book 9 (Śalyaparvan). The discussion explores the impossibility of reproducing the quantity-based Sanskrit metres—such as śloka, triṣṭubh, and jagatī—within the Polish stress-based prosodic system, and proposes rhythmical equivalents drawn from Polish poetic traditions. These include trochaic octosyllabic lines, three-footed dactylic metres, and the eleven- and twelve-syllable verse patterns characteristic of Polish Romantic and children’s poetry. By tracing metrical correspondences between classical Sanskrit verse and Polish literary rhythms, the author reveals how the act of translation becomes both a linguistic experiment and a cultural rediscovery, bridging ancient Indian poetics with deeply familiar patterns of Polish verse.
Koṭuṅṅallūr Kuññikkuṭṭan Tampurān (1864–1913) completed a verse translation of the Mahābhārata in just 874 days, reproducing the exact metres of the original text. This unique work is superior in literary merit to the earlier fourteenth- and fifteenth-century attempts to translate the Mahābhārata within Kerala’s musical song tradition known as pāṭṭu. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, when scholarly translations rather than free adaptations had become the norm, the author sought to produce an accurate mirror image of the original Sanskrit text in Malayalam, rather than a loose retelling in verse. Unlike Tuñcatt Eḷuttacchan, who employed a lucid maṇipravāḷa hybrid tilted towards Malayalam and enriched with Sanskrit vocabulary, Tampurān used a more colloquial form of Malayalam, which made his expression lively and accessible to common readers. The work also differs from the monumental English rendering by K.M. Ganguli (The Mahābhārata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa), which does not preserve the metrical structure of the original. Even more remarkable is the fact that Tampurān’s translation was produced extempore, shedding light on the literary culture that prevailed in nineteenth-century Kerala. This paper investigates both the cultural and aesthetic significance of this extraordinary translation project.
The present article aims at investigating selected passages from the Sanskrit version of Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Published in 2019 as Ḍān Kvikṣoṭaḥ, the translation was completed in 1936 by two Kashmiri Pandits—Jagaddhar Zadoo and Nityanand Shastri—on the basis of an English rendering by Charles Jarvis published in 1742. The study of the windmill episode from the Quijote (I, 8) and the comparative analysis of the early modern Spanish original, the English medium, and the Sanskrit translation reveal how the practice of translating not from the original source may influence the meaning and enlighten the difficulties of rendering extraneous elements in a language such as Sanskrit, quite distant from morphological and phonetical points of view. In the course of the analysis special attention is paid to the rendering of proper names, modern concepts and objects, specific expressions and to the translation strategies employed by the Indian Pandits.
This article explores two modern Sanskrit translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyats, created independently by Pandit Adibhatla Narayana Das (1937) and Professor Narahari Govind Suru (1981). Both scholars worked from Edward FitzGerald’s English version, adapting it into Sanskrit according to classical poetic conventions. Through a comparative analysis, the study examines the translators’ differing choices of metre, diction, and cultural adaptation, highlighting how each negotiates the challenges of rendering Khayyam’s philosophical quatrains within the rigid structure and aesthetic expectations of Sanskrit poetry. Attention is also given to strategies of domestication and foreignisation, revealing how each translator reinterprets the Persian original within an Indian literary and intellectual context. Ultimately, these translations not only exemplify creative engagement with classical Sanskrit forms but also illuminate broader processes of cross-cultural mediation and the modern reinvention of Sanskrit literary expression.
Speakers possess a linguistic repertoire of various codes (languages) and speech styles such as regional dialects, registers of (in)formality, and sociolects indexing gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, and more. Speakers alternate among these styles to express multiple identities, shifting relationships, and changing stances (i.e., speaker’s attitude toward a topic, message). Japanese entertainment media masterfully deploys Japanese speech styles and their associated linguistic features (e.g., pronouns, verb forms) to develop storylines. However, these indexical features are largely lost in English-translated subtitles, resulting in one-dimensional characters, flatter interactions, and storylines with less depth while erasing the voices of marginalized groups (e.g., regional, LGBTQIA+) and perpetuating images of a monolithic Japan. The current study investigates the degree of erasure of Japanese speech styles in Thai translations of several TV shows. English appears to act as a pivot language in streaming platforms such as Netflix whereby Japanese is translated into English and then, into a third language like Thai, reflecting English translation/linguistic constraints. Yet, direct Japanese-to-Thai translations appear to allow for more accurate representation of these shared indexical features (e.g., multiple first- and second-pronouns, verb forms) and their associated speech styles and thereby, create richer characters, interactions, and stories.
| Deadlines: The deadline for submitting an article for publication in a volume in a given year is 31 May. The deadline for submission of review articles and book reviews is 31 July. If you miss this deadline, please contact the editorial office. The volume is published annually in December. |
en
pl
