The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages

How does the multilingual and multicultural writing of a ‘minor’ author, who went global almost overnight, travel in translation? The prose of Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), a contemporary Polish writer and the 2018 Nobel Prize winner, has reached international audiences thanks to the heroic work of multiple translators into many languages. These ‘tender translators’ are especially attuned to the issues of borderlands, multilingualism, and intercultural negotiations in her work, while also remaining entangled in the politics of publishing and marketing a lesser‑known literary culture for their local readerships. In order to reveal all these different modes of thinking and writing about translation, this collection brings together both theorists and practitioners of translation based in at least ten different countries and on four continents, including Olga Tokarczuk herself as well as her own translators into multiple languages.

Kasia Szymanska, Lecturer at the Centre of Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester and author of Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy (Princeton, forthcoming).

Joanna Trzeciak Huss, Professor of Russian and Polish Translation and Translation Studies at Kent State University, editor of a special issue of The Polish Review devoted to Olga Tokarczuk and award-winning translator of Polish literature.