This article aims to discuss Polish-language dubbing in the interwar period. The main aim is to compile the most comprehensive corpus of dubbed films and to provide relevant information about each translation. The data has been retrieved from Polish archives and press articles. Polish audiovisual archives contain only three films that were analysed, with a special reference to the metadata concerning individuals who had created the films. However, neither the films nor the metadata were sufficient to examine and assess the dubbing used in the movies. Therefore, most of the information about the films discussed in the article has been collected by analysing press articles taken from daily papers as well as film magazines. The numerous quotes cited in the article are intended to illustrate that dynamic period of film translation. They demonstrate that Poland did not lag behind the worldwide trends in film translation. Actually, this country did play its role in the development of dubbing of European and American films, though sometimes with difficulty and imperfectly. Over time, Poland developed its dubbing staff, while that specific mode of translation improved. Finally, in the late 1930s, thanks to individuals such as Ryszard Ordyński and his translation of Disney’s Snow White, Polish dubbing stood out against other dubbing practices.
In the article I address the problem of the reception of translations from the poetry of the New York School. In the late 1980s and early 1990s in Poland this reception was determined by issues of political transformation, which precluded the possibility of reading O’Hara’s poetry in relation to queer studies. O’Hara’s works, whose style and strategies largely depend on camp stylistics, present a distinctly queer character. Through the setting of Piotr Sommer’s translations in Twoja pojedynczość (1987), the metatexts collected for the publication of O'Hara's poems in the New York issue of “Literatura na Świecie” (1986: 7), and finally through poetic allusions in the translated poet's texts, this element was exposed in a sufficiently expressive way. Neither in the 1990s nor later has the ‘queer orientation’ of O'Hara’s poetry shape the Polish reception of his work in any way.
Salman Rushdie’s work has undoubtedly become a central reference point in the canon of postcolonial literature, as well as a key component of contemporary world literature, as constructed within the frameworks of Western literary scholarship. At the same time, it is clear that the reception of Rushdie’s writing in Poland has followed a distinct trajectory from that of the global context. While he is a recognizable author among Polish readers, and all of his prose works, along with most of his essay collections, are consistently published in Polish translations shortly after their original English release, accompanied by substantial media and promotional attention, academic studies on Rushdie by Polish scholars remain relatively scarce. Rushdie, a foundational figure in global postcolonial literature, appears to be so extensively examined in the English-language context that he seems less appealing to Polish researchers than writers occupying more peripheral positions. A closer look at the early decades of Rushdie’s reception in Poland, however, reveals more complex dynamics shaping his Polish readership. These include not only questions of translation, cultural foreignness, and its transmission, but also various forms of political entanglement and the evolving position of Polish culture in relation to the global literary landscape. His first novel was met with significant scepticism from Polish reviewers as early as the 1970s. Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, was largely interpreted as a mere “offshoot” of magical realism, and several different excerpts were translated by various translators for Polish literary journals. The Satanic Verses was long read almost exclusively through the lens of Muslim backlash and the so-called “Rushdie Affair”. During Poland’s early post-communist transition, public debate in the press even questioned whether such a novel should be translated at all, with responses heavily influenced by the political leanings of the commentators. Only over time did attention begin to shift toward the literary quality of Rushdie’s texts and the thematic issues he explores. The Polish reception of Salman Rushdie’s work thus serves as a lens through which to examine the complexities of how postcolonial discourses and authors find their place in Polish cultural space, as well as how global literature and its cultural contexts are received, translated, and reinterpreted.
One of methodological problems translation historians face is a limited availability of bibliographic material – a result of the systemic marginalisation of translators and translations in catalogues. New research tools such as metadata databases offer hope for a breakthrough in the availability of reliable, well-organised and validated bibliographic data. However, this is only a starting point for historical research; another challenge is to develop a procedure to move from the data to a narrative and, subsequently, to a historical panorama. In the research project ‘A Century of Translation. Translators and their work in Polish literature after 1918’, we have been able to tackle the first of these problems quite well. However, the second one still needs to be addressed. This article attempts to create a procedure leading from bibliographic metadata to a historical-translational narrative and proposes some procedures that can be applied to a big and complex data set. We want to observe verifiable and reproducible results and show the limitations of this type of research. As a case study we select 400 records from the database: translations from the French made by women and published in the years 1945–1970. We offer a quantitative analysis and contextualise the results in order to understand the meaning behind the numbers, trace the lines of inquiry they suggest and draw lines of interpreting their social, cultural and ideological contexts in order to reach conclusions regarding the structure and conditions of the literary translation field of the period.
