„Jeżeli okoliczności nie pozwalają powiedzieć prawdy...” O nie wydanym niemieckim przekładzie „Gwiazdy zarannej” Marii Dąbrowskiej
“When Circumstances Disallow to Tell the Truth...” The Unpublished German Translation of Maria Dąbrowska’s “Gwiazda zaranna” (“Morning Star”)

Summary/Abstract: The article refers to Maria Dąbrowska’s problems connected with the translations of her works into German, and especially with the collection “Morning Star”, in which the most important story was “Countryside Wedding”. The paper evokes the political background of Dąbrowska’s difficult contacts with the German publishers, being different in East and West Germany. While the publishing problems in the German Democratic Republic resulted from fear of presenting the reader a new formula of Polish literature called later “thaw literature”, in Western Germany, if disposed of a special political meaning, the texts were unattractive and old-fashioned. Atmosphere of scandal that accompanied the ban on publishing “Countryside Wedding” indicated more than German readers could learn by reading it. Dąbrowska’s correspondence with the German publishers reveals the absurd of censorship requirements in the German Democratic Republic in times when it was much more lenient even in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Dąbrowska’s fight for the change of afterword to the collection of “Der dritte Herbst" shows the scope of hypocrisy about the newest Polish history in German propaganda around 1960. The correspondence also suggests that the high level of translation of the collection “Morning Star” and others was significantly added by Jan Pierzchała, who at this time worked in Berlin as cultural attaché. Quotations from Dąbrowska’s letters reveal also her views of the art of translation.

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