Translation and Transmission: Stanisław Lem in Japan

Mitsuyoshi Numano is professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo where he taught Russian literature, Polish literature, and world literature. He is past President of the Japan Society for the Study of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of over a dozen books, including a trilogy covering émigré literature, utopian literature, and world literature. He is well-known for his Japanese translations of Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Brodsky from the Russian and for his translations of Ignacy Krasicki, Stanisław Lem, and Wisława Szymborska from the Polish.

Elżbieta Skibińska is a professor in the Department of Translation Studies in the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Wrocław. She is co-founder and coordinator of the international team Traduction comme moyen de communication interculturelle (Lille, Wrocław, Kraków, Miluza). She is also editor-in-chief of the journal Romanica Wratislaviensia. Head of the Doctoral College of the Faculty of Philology, she works on the problems of translation in linguistic, cultural, and socioliterary terms. She is the author of numerous works on translation as intercultural mediation, including the monograph Przekład a kultura: Elementy kulturowe we francuskich tłumaczeniach “Pana Tadeusza” and Kuchnia tłumacza: Studia o polsko-francuskich relacjach przekładowych.

Joanna Trzeciak Huss is a professor of translation studies and Polish and Russian translation at Kent State University. Her research concerns collaborative translation, self-translation, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and Polish literature, and issues at the intersection of literature and philosophy. For The Polish Review, she has edited a special issue on Olga Tokarczuk (2021). Her translations from Polish and Russian have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Zvezda, Boston Review, nonsite, and New Ohio Review, among others. Her books of poetry translation include Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska (W. W. Norton) and Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz (W. W. Norton). Her Firebird: Collected Poems of Zuzanna Ginczanka is forthcoming in 2023 from Zephyr Press. She is the recipient of the 2020 Michael Heim Prize for Collegial Translation.