Autotraduttori polacchi del Novecento: un saggio di ricognizione

20th-Century Polish Self-Translators: a Reconnaissance Survey Twentieth-Century Polish literature provides surprisingly many examples of writers who happened to become translators of their own works, such as Stanisław Przybyszewski (German), Tadeusz Rittner (German), Wacław Sieroszewski (Russian), Bruno Jasieński (Russian), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (French), Debora Vogel (Yiddish), Stanisław Kubicki (German), Stefan Themerson (English), Maria Kuncewiczowa (English), Stanisław Barańczak (English), Witold Gombrowicz (Spanish), Czesław Miłosz (English) and many others. The author of this paper aims first of all to draw attention to the practice of selftranslation by Polish writers, which turns out to be much more widespread than the number of studies devoted to it would suggest. The paper is intended as a sort of preliminary reconnaissance of the field of analysis, leading to the realization of its real dimensions, of the kind of issues it involves, of its constants and variants. Three periods are highlighted, when selftranslation is practiced in different contexts: before the World War I the keyword explaining the recourse to self-translation is expropriation (Poland is deprived of state sovereignty, bilingualism is imposed by the invaders), between the Wars it is experiment, and after World War II it is exile. An outline of each self-translator’s activity is traced, including an analysis of self-translation’s motivations (internal factors and external factors), directionality (from and into which language, unidirectional or bidirectional), frequency (occasional, repeated or usual) and degree of authoriality (alone or in collaboration).