The Paths of Polish Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature Leading to Spanish Speaking Readers

Abstract

The Nobel prize in Literature, apart from the prestige for the winners, brings an explosion of translations of their works and makes them accessible to readers all over the world. The four Polish winners of the prize, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Władysław Reymont, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, have found their paths to the Spanish speaking public. However, it seems that in the case of Sienkiewicz the influence of the price was minimum: the writer was in tune with the taste of his time and his prose became a publishing success before he received the Nobel, despite the poor quality of the translations. As for The Peasants by Reymont, the complete text of the novel was translated to Spanish probably due to the fact that the author was awarded the prize and up to that moment the readers had only an extract translated from French, which surprisingly continues to be published in the XXI century, despite of all its flaws. Finally, as regards the two great representatives of Polish poetry, the impact of the Nobel prize was decisive for their presence in the Spanish publishing market. Nowadays the Spanish speaking readers, for whom the two poets were completely unknown, have several translations—moreover, magnificent ones—of their works: in the case of Miłosz, a representative sample, in the case of Szymborska, practically all of her poems.