Pomiędzy wiernością a wolnością
Between Fidelity and Freedom

Summary/Abstract: Ancient playwrights created their plays to be performed on the Athenian stage in the 5th century BC. Within the ensuing centuries, though, their plays were regarded mainly as literary works. Such was the prevailing attitude in the 19th century, when first Polish translations of Greek tragedies were published; it was also very common in the 20th century. However, some translators were aware of the fact that what they translated was not only poetry, but also a material for the stage. Since a Polish theatrical stage differed from the ancient one, a translator of any drama found themselves not only between languages and cultures, but also between stage conventions. That is why their work was always interdisciplinary, it also required inventiveness. But their licence was usually constrained by contemporary literary and theatrical tendencies, and also by the current body of research on antiquity, which was constantly changing. We will never have access to the original idea of those works, but we may try to follow the translator’s work, and try to understand their decisions, their interpretation of a play and the staging potential designed in the final translation, which influences the imagination of readers or spectators. Making use of the necessarily interdisciplinary standpoints as well as selected examples of Polish translations, this paper considers the role of translators in rendering a play from a distant past into the modern world.

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