ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the meandering story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) in Polish translations, which had been examined as part of the Prismatic Jane Eyre project run by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre. The key questions at stake were the following: firstly, what could different renderings of Jane Eyre in Polish tell us about the history of Polish literary translation? And secondly, to what extent was the ‘strange fate’ of Polish Jane Eyre representative of translation norms and cultural trends in given historical moments? Spanning three different centuries, the five existing Polish translations testify to the shifting political landscape and changing translation norms. Depending on the period, the publishing culture in Poland could favour distinct modes of translation and circulation, including abridged translation, indirect translation, canonisation, or multiplication. While sketching these broader contexts, the following chapter also addresses the issue of how the representation of the woman hinged upon literary genres and aesthetic conventions popular at given times, in particular pagan folklore and Slavic mythology.
