A feminine touch: Hanna Januszewska as cultural mediator in Poland for Charles Perrault’s fairy tales

Hanna Januszewska (1905-1980) belongs to the large group of Polish writers for children born at the beginning of the twentieth century who debuted in the period between the two world wars and then pursued their career in a very different context of post-war communist Poland, seeking to adapt their texts to the ideological pressures of the regime without giving up the creative originality. In the case of Januszewska this attitude manifested itself through a continual rewriting of her own texts that came to have a different form in each successive edition, but it also found an interesting twist in her adaptations of fairy tales. Already in 1952, the writer published the volume "Baśnie polskie" (Polish Fairy Tales) which freely mixed motifs of Polish folklore with those of classical fairy tales, among other things "Beauty and the Beast". A few years later (in a now less restrictive political climate) Januszewska was given the task of preparing the first Polish translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales until then known in Poland only through free adaptations. Despite writer’s truly remarkable effort, the volume “Baśnie”, published in 1961, did not find favour with the readers. Some years later Januszewska decided to retouch it or rather rewrite her own translation, starting with "Cinderella" and "The cat with boots". She used fragments of the original translations, but brought the plot closer to the sensitivity of the children and "polonized" the style of the texts. Subsequently, in 1971 the new volume of “Bajki” came out, obtaining a resounding success with the public. It became in fact the canonical version of the most famous tales, thus replacing the previous retellings. To this day, Perrault's perception in Poland is filtered by Januszewska's adaptation, far removed from the original text. In my intervention I would like to analyse the strategies followed by the Polish writer in the transition from translation to the adaptation of fairy tales, focusing above all on her great ability to understand the preferences and tastes of younger children.