The Polish Premiere of John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World”

The article traces the history of the Polish premiere and an early reception of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. The author draws attention to similarities between Irish and Polish political and historical situations in which the plays premiered, respectively, in 1907 and in 1913. Firstly, Keane concentrates on analyzing the translator’s strategy in rendering the difficult Hyberno-English dialect present in Synge’s play. The translator, Florian Sobieniowski, chose to render the specific diction of the play using the poetic language of the Young Poland movement. He also modelled his translation on the language and partly the imagery of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s acclaimed play The Wedding (Wesele, 1901). Keane discusses some of the translator’s choices and provides the summary of the critical response to what he terms the acculturation policy of the translator. Analyzing fragments of most characteristic reviews of the Polish premiere of Synge’s play, Keane discusses the presence of cultural stereotyping and the reactions to acculturation in the Polish theatre and culture