Literature, Politics and the CIA: Polish-English Literary Translation at the Time of the Cold War

The paper examines the interdependence of literature and world politics, focusing on contemporary Polish prose, mainly in English translation, promoted in the West between 1945 and 1989 for its anti-communist message, not rarely with the financial backing from the CIA, denied to apolitical Polish writing. Among others, it addresses the question of the instrumental treatment of writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the ideological censorship of the original as well as of the translated literary texts. Taken into account are works of fiction by Czesław Miłosz, Marek Hłasko, Witold Gombrowicz, Jerzy Andrzejewski and Ryszard Kapuściński.