Florentine Nights, or Domesticating Romola: The forgotten Polish Translation of George Eliot’s Novel
Florentine Nights, or Domesticating Romola: The forgotten Polish Translation of George Eliot’s Novel

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses an anonymous Polish translation of George Eliot’s 1863 novel Romola, published in the late nineteen-twenties by the Edward Wende publishing house. The Polish version, which appeared with the title Noce florenckie (Florentine Nights) and a photo of Lilian Gish on the cover, may be seen as an early case of a movie tie-in. The discussion focuses on the domesticating strategies used by the Polish translator, who paid attention only to the elements that move the personal story of Romola, Tito and Tessa forward, and removed most of the elements that deal with the history and culture of Renaissance Florence. As a result, the translation becomes a highly simplified paraphrase that reads easily and fluently, but gives the reader almost no insight into the multidimensional world of George Eliot’s novel, the complexity of which arises in part from Eliot’s foreignizing approach towards the Italian sources used for Romola.

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