We were very pleased to hear from Laurence Warner that the Medieval Symposium at last week’s International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE) conference in Rome included a presentation by Professor Ewa Kujawska-Lis on “Canterbury Tales in Polish.” Of course, we contacted Ewa right away. She kindly provided précis of her paper for us to share with the Global Chaucers community. We look forward to learning more from her as she expands our knowledge of Chaucer’s long and deep presence in Polish translations and scholarship.

by Ewa Kujawska-Lis, Director of the Institute of Literary Studies, Faculty of Humanities,
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland

In Poland, Chaucer’s artistry was first noticed by two outstanding literary figures (poets, writers, and journalists): Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) and Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Well acquainted with European literature, they offered appreciative comments on the English poet almost a century before any Polish translation was available. Readers needed to wait until 1907 to get the feel of Chaucer themselves. This is when Jan Kasprowicz (1860-1926), a poet, playwright, critic, and translator, included fragments of The General Prologue and a large section of The Friar’s Tale in his anthology Poeci angielscy (English Poets). The translation, consisting of about 20 pages, served as an introduction of Chaucer to the Polish literary system and was based on the edition of The Canterbury Tales by Thomas Tyrwhitt (1775-78) and a German translation by Wilhelm Hertzberg (1866).

Half a century later, in 1956 Przemyslaw Mroczkowski published his monumental study Opowieści kanterberyjskie na tle epoki (The Canterbury Tales against the backdrop of the epoch), originally written in 1951, which was a milestone in introducing Chaucer to Polish scholars in the vein of what would be in the future termed cultural poetics. Subsequently, in 1988, he also translated The Knight’s Tale.

This served as a complement to the first more extensive translation of The Canterbury Tales into Polish that was created by Helena Pręczkowska and published in 1963 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Im. Ossolińskich, 1963; reprinted in 1978 and 1987) (image at left). This volume included The General Prologue and eleven Tales selected by Witold Chwalewik, based on his rather arbitrary decision as to which stories should be translated.

Finally, the complete translation of The Canterbury Tales was published in 2022 as the second volume of a non-commercial series Bibliotheca Translata by the publishing house Biblioteka Śląska (image at top). The translation was done by Jarek Zawadzki, a translator of literature from English and Chinese, based on Walter W. Skeat’s edition of 1894, with illustrations by Maciej Sieńczyk, a graphic artist, illustrator, comic book creator.