„Fortunat” Marcina Siennika: „abych zawsze pieniędzy dostatek miał”
Marcin Siennik’s “Fortunat” (“Fortunatus”): “abych zawsze pieniędzy dostatek miał [That I Always Be Abundant in Money]”

Summary/Abstract: “Fortunatus” was first published (anonymously by Johann Otamar) in Augsburg in the year 1509, and in the second part of the 16th c. in the translation of Marcin Siennik who used the Frankfurt’s 1564 edition. “Fortunatus” was a bestseller and one of the most widely read romance of its times. In the context of the Polish scanty and incomprehensive research to this day, and first and foremost the German multifaceted and varied approaches, the author of the paper challenges the interpretative stances of “Fortunatus” as well as the points of Jurij Striedter made in his work “Der polnische »Fortunatus« und seine deutsche Vorlage” (“The Polish »Fortunatus« and Its German Edition”), to this day the basic study for the research in the translation. Fictionality of the text, and also its various narrative techniques and conventions, offer interpretative diversity, each time accentuating a given aspect of the adopted convention. “Fortunatus” is an individual transformation into peculiar novelistic entity of the available in the German-language bookseller print circulation and information collection carried by the vernacular texts. It is a novel and distinctive quality. In the literature on the piece, attention is paid to the fact that it lacks a unified axiological (and interpretative) system, that the narrative is set in the context of the world of aristocratic values, in chivalry code with its symbolic representation, and the world of middle-class, early-capitalist civilisation with pecuniary exchange significance.

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