The Influence of Socialist Ideology on State-Sponsored English Translations of Polish Literature, 1954-1989.

Selection
If one looks hard enough, one can always find evidence that ideology skewed the selection of literature to translate for foreign audiences. Strzetelski’s 1977 An Introduction to Polish Literature, which contained translations of Polish literature for foreign university students, may serve as an example here. Is it a coincidence that one of the Żeromski pieces chosen for inclusion is from “Sen o szpadzie” (“A Dream of a Sword”) and concerns the socialist revolution of 1905? Or that one of the two pieces by Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817) – a revolutionary leader, not a writer – is his “Proclamation Concerning an Israelite Regiment” which expresses approval of and solidarity with Jews in Poland? Or that one of the Norwid poems is “Żydowie polscy” (“Polish Jews”) with its line, as translated by Strzetelski, “Grave nation, honour to you…” (Norwid 1977: 144)? It is followed by his “Do obywatela Johna Browna” (“To Citizen John Brown”) about the American abolitionist. Memoirs of my Times, by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (ca. 1758-1841), is, the editor tells us, an “important historical document” (Strzetelski 1977: 92). The Niemcewicz piece chosen for selection concerns the living conditions of slaves in the USA. 
There is always a risk of over-interpreting innocent editorial choices. Strzetelski did not have to ransack the archives to find obscure poems by Norwid that might reflect poorly on the USA and well on Polish-Jewish relations. Both the poems mentioned above are well-known and often anthologised, “Żydowie polscy,” for example in the National Library’s 1924 selection of Norwid’s poems (Biblioteka Narodowa I, 64). Also, it is only to be expected that an editor trying to present nearly a thousand years of a country’s literature would want to put his best foot forward. The Jesuit preacher Piotr Skarga (1536-1612) is represented here not by his ferocious condemnations of Protestants but by “Kazanie wtóre” (“The Second Sermon”), in which he preaches subordination of the individual to the greater good using the image of a ship in danger of sinking: only a fool, he writes, would secure his own goods and not defend the ship. And yet this excerpt of the sermon is consonant with socialist ideals that prioritise the collective at the expense of the individual.
Another argument that Strzetelski was far from pushing the Party line is the inclusion of a letter from Joseph Conrad to Stefan Żeromski that refers to Conrad’s Notes on Life and Letters. Conrad’s Works had been published in Poland without his political writings, an observation the censors did not permit into print. Notes on Life and Letters, which students from America could of course look up when they returned from their Polish studies in Cracow, contains, among other essays, “The Crime of Partition” and “A Note on the Polish Problem.” Another way of looking at his selection criteria is that Strzetelski included some condemnations of slavery in America so that he could get away with publishing some Conrad.
Answering the question of whether and how much the selection of works to translate was influenced by ideology is complicated by the fact that the production and dissemination of literature at home had already been influenced by that same ideology. These were not the same writers and stories that would likely have been translated even if post-war Poland had not been a part of the socialist camp because they were not the same writers and stories who would have been published in the first place. The texts translated by the state had already been filtered by editors, politicians, censors, and authors themselves in anticipation of the authorities’ objections. Any study of the export of a country’s literature, therefore, is a study of  a selection of a selection. English readers will find few if any translations of outstanding political novels about Stalinism in Poland not because the state did not translate them but  because, thanks to the censorship, there were no such novels, at least before 1975 (Gawliński 1993: 141). 
	In theory, there were no politically sensitive books by dissident authors. In practice, authors fell in and out of favour with the authorities in People’s Poland. Tadeusz Konwicki, Jerzy Andrzejewski and Marek Nowakowski received much less state-sponsored exposure to English speakers after the early 1970s, for example. Other writers found favour, like the socialists Andrzej Strug and Leon Kruczkowski, or Mirosław Kowalski with the obvious propaganda of his “It’s That Extra Effort That Counts.”
	If anything, the magazine editors and anthologisers tried to avoid socialist politics. They published Konwicki’s World War Two partisan stories but not the socialist realist reportage of his At the Building Site; a chapter from Witold Zalewski’s Dolina królów (Valley of The Kings) but not from his Tractors Will Win the Spring; poems by Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, but not his “Poemat dla zdrajcy” (“Poem for a Traitor”), about Czesław Miłosz, or his panegyric to Stalin. They published communist writer Bohdan Czeszko eight times and yet there is barely a hint of communism in any of the pieces. When they chose to publish Krystyna Pająkowa, the material selected from her book neatly avoids all references to the narrator’s membership of the Party.
It is difficult to see a systematic application of socialist ideology to the selection of literature for translation by the state into English. Rather, some individual decisions are more or less strikingly ideological. Items such as Andrzej Braun’s “The Levanters” in the Polish Review, Krystyna Kolinska’s “To Kill the Darkness” in Polish Perspectives, and Adolf Rudnicki’s “Józefów” in Poland as well as Igor Newerly’s A Night of Remembrance and Jan Dobraczyński’s Hands on the Wall stand out against a background of literary fiction that does not itself seek to propagate socialism. 

Paratexts
Did editors and critics try to put an ideological slant on stories in their introductions and other commentaries? Again, there is the matter of “pre-selection” to bear in mind. One sometimes finds an explicitly ideological paratext but the piece of literature to which is refers is ideological and the paratext consonant with it. This is the case, for example, with Władysław Broniewski, introduced to readers of the Polish Review as “a revolutionist, who chose poetry for his battlefield” (Raina 1965: 38). Western readers might find this image off-putting but Broniewski was a communist and one of the poems thus introduced is called “On the Death of a Revolutionist.” It is also true of the introduction to an excerpt from A Night of Remembrance, which “deals with the formation of ideological consciousness of the Polish proletariat in the period between the two World Wars” (Newerly 1967: 38). Newerly’s novel does deal with this question and so does the translated extract. 
	Writers of paratexts were constrained by the texts they were commenting on and elementary standards of honesty. There is no evidence of gross misrepresentation of the works and authors that were translated. Some editors might be accused of trying too hard to claim those works for the socialist or at least progressive cause but their arguments are almost always at least defensible. An editor wishing to publish politically sensitive material might try to ease its path into print by putting a socialist spin on it. This is something that can sometimes be observed behind the scenes, in censors’ reports, but there is little evidence of it in the published paratexts. We do not find editors trying to persuade readers that Andrzejewski, Brandys, Konwicki and others were committed socialists once they had ceased to be committed socialists. Even when these writers were still supportive of the socialist system, editors rarely mentioned their Party membership. Nor do we find attempts to radically reinterpret fiction, to claim, for example, that Mrożek’s “A Wedding in Atomville,” published in Poland in August 1960, is really about the countryside in capitalist countries.
Editors and occasionally authors themselves are sometimes to be found pushing particular interpretations of the translated literature. Some encourage readers to see certain stories as being universal in scope (Herbert’s Cave of Philosophers, Przybyszewska’s The Danton Case, Nowakowski’s “Jóźwa”); others rule out universal interpretation, limiting the story’s scope in time and place (Bocheński’s Boski Juliusz, Broszkiewicz’s The Names of Power). What links the two practices is a desire to avoid closely identifying the fiction with the reality of contemporary Poland. Some, at least, of these paratexts were aimed at – if not demanded by – the censors.
The paratexts are evasive: they avoid some subjects, like the fact that Andrzejewski, Brandys, Konwicki and others were no longer committed socialists. They do not explain why Wygodzki and Grynberg stopped appearing in translation. Other subjects are broached but only superficially, and euphemistically. For example, Jerzy Strzetelski’s introduction to Miłosz’s poems in his anthology of Polish literature says simply that after the war Miłosz “did not approve of the political and social situation in the country and emigrated to the United States, where he has eventually become a professor” (Strzetelski 1977: 310). 
Evasiveness shows up in references to socialist realism. The imposition of socialist realism meant that a lot of writers fell silent for a few years, some of them writing “for the desk drawer” – that is, with no prospect of publication. When editors mentioned this silence it was usually without attributing it to politics or ideology, much less to brute censorship. In Poland in 1958, Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz, ascribes Stanisław Dygat’s long silence (1945 to 1956) to his being, by his own admission, more interested in life than in writing. “It was only around 1956 that Dygat’s name as a writer appeared one again in the columns of literary papers” (Toeplitz 1958a: 13). 

Translation
How might a partisan translator in People’s Poland, unconcerned with strict faithfulness to the source, manipulate the following work of fiction, a description of lay-offs in a French factory in the inter-war period?

Od dwóch tygodni trwał już ten milczący połów. Pierre słyszał od kolegów: we Francji, z racji kiepskiej koniunktury, ludzie przestali kupować samochody. Fabrykom groziło zamknięcie. Wszędzie redukowano do połowy personel. Celem uniknięcia zaburzeń usuwano po kilku ludzi o różnych porach dnia, z różnych oddziałów. (Jasieńśki 1974: 9-10)

Gawliński, Stanisław. 1993. Polityczne obowiązki. Odmiany powojennej prozy politycznej w latach 1945-1975. Cracow: Uniwersytet Jagielloński.
Newerly, Igor. 1967. “A Night of Remembrance,” tr. Ilona R. Sues. The Polish Review 5: 38-40.
Raina, P.K. 1965. Untitled Introduction. The Polish Review 12: 38.
Strzetelski, Jerzy. 1977. An Introduction to Polish Literature. Part II. An Anthology. Skrypty Uczelniane Nr. 273. Cracow: Uniwersytet Jagiełłoński.
Toeplitz, Krzysztof T. 1958a. Untitled Introduction. Poland 9: 13.