Szwedzkie matki powieści na ziemiach polskich. Fenomen Marie Sophie Schwartz w perspektywie transkulturowej
Swedish Mothers of Stories on Polish Land. The Phenomenon of Marie Sophie Schwartz in a Transcultural Perspective

Summary/Abstract: The article outlines a surge in the popularity of Swedish women writers in the second half of the 19th century in the territories inhabited by Poles, which resulted in numerous Polish translations, retranslations and editions of their works. The most widely read among them was Marie Sophie Schwartz, initially identified as the author of entertainment literature, then as an advocate of progressive ideas on labour, social equality, and women’s emancipation, which resonated with ideas of positivism propagated in the Polish territories in the post-1863-insurrection against the Russian empire. The article adopts Translation Studies as the theoretical approach, which treats translations as texts in the literary polysystem of the target culture that determines translatorial decisions. Thus, the selection of translated works, translations of titles and details of translations are subject of reflection. A comparative analysis of two different translations of Schwatrz’s Emancipationsvurmen enables us to draw conclusions regarding the emancipatory consciousness, which in the Polish culture was the subject of debates in the 1870s, but was still hardly present in it in the 1860s. The translations demonstrate a number of manipulations aiming at foregrounding or weakening the emancipatory message of Schwartz’s novel, which allows us to see her as socially engaged writer, propagating reforms in the spirit of positivism.

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