The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature ed. by Tomasz Bilczewski; Stanley Bill, and Magdalena Popiel

Reviewed by: The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature ed. by Tomasz Bilczewski; Stanley Bill, and Magdalena Popiel Kasia Szymańska Bilczewski, Tomasz; Bill, Stanley and Popiel, Magdalena (eds). The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022. xix + 450 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £160.00; £35.99 (e-book). This is an unprecedentedly busy time for Polish studies abroad. In the past few years, at least three different English-language textbooks and companions to Polish literature and culture have offered new perspectives on its history and reception. To start with, the monumental textbook, Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (eds T. Trojanowska, J. Niżyńska, P. Czapliński, Toronto, 2018), marked the centenary of Poland's regained independence and brought into discussion a wide range of new genres, topics and approaches (graphic novels, film, mass media, multilingualism, translation). In turn, Polish Literature as World Literature (eds P. Florczyk and K. A. Wiśniewski, London, 2023), looks at a relatively modest selection of sixteen essays concentrating only on explicit contributions of Polish authors to world literature. Somewhat bookended by these two volumes, The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature strikes the middle ground between the formats of the other two publications. On the one hand, this heavy tome replicates the panache and broad sweep of a comprehensive textbook of Polish literature. The editors have assembled a series of thirty-three case studies, all neatly divided into traditional literary epochs across an impressively long time-span from the Middle Ages to the present day, and incorporating many different literary genres (e.g. poetry, the novel, the short story, memoir, travel writing). On the other hand, the book offers a focused selection of case studies and close readings guided by the interests of world literature. By tracing the meandering history of how some authors and their works were transplanted into different languages and read by international audiences, the book aims to tell a different history of Polish literature: that written by its readers, translators and aficionados abroad. The key strength of the volume lies in its kaleidoscopic overview of micro-stories, as the volume treats its readers to a wide array of international encounters. Some of its more successful approaches stem from the following strategy: where a Polish author has engaged with intercultural material (e.g. Ryszard Kapuściński travelling to China, or Mariusz Wilk writing Polish-Russian prose), let us see the other side of the coin by examining how the work has been received in that other cultural realm. It is thus rewarding to read about the Italian fascination with Henryk Sienkiewicz's vision of Nero's Rome in his novel, Quo vadis (1895–96); to discover the Lithuanian counterpart of poet Adam Mickiewicz who completes his otherwise Polonized picture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and to see how Dutch poets engaged with [End Page 747] Zbigniew Herbert's Mr Cogito (1974) in response to his essays on seventeenth-century Dutch art. While other combinations were more serendipitous, some of them proved equally fruitful, especially when foregrounding the role of translation and rewriting in the transfer. Who would have thought that Mickiewicz's poems could be reimagined and read against the historical backdrop of slavery in Brazil; that the so-called '9/11 poem' by Adam Zagajewski has travelled far and wide, resonating with so many distinct audiences; that dialogues between Jewish and Polish characters in Bolesław Prus's The Doll (1890) were translated into Japanese by means of katakana and hiragana scripts to render the novel's linguistic variation; and that one missing phrase across different translations and editions of Miron Białoszewski's Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970) could bear such significance for its interpretation alongside other war testimonies? These literary excursions not only give us insight into how Polish works are circulated and read beyond their original context of publication, but they also reveal which of their themes and qualities lend themselves to sometimes surprising and unconventional readings. While I am largely enthusiastic about the ideas underpinning the volume, I would like to raise a few caveats related to its presentation...

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