According to literary scholar Wojciech Browarny, the 1990s witnessed a “reorientation of the mental map” of East-Central Europe. In the case of Poland, the collapse of the repressive and ideological underpinnings of Marxist-Leninism led to seismic shifts in all aspects of material life, including publishing. Just as state-run publishing houses were privatized and the central apparatus of censorship was liquidated, new loci of literary production began to appear throughout regional capitals and provincial towns. The decentralization of literary production coincided with a thematic about-turn within writing, as certain authors interested in regional themes achieved national distribution and attention.
This talk focuses on one such nationally-prominent “regional” author, Jerzy Pilch (1952-2020), whose autofictional works of the 1990s consistently engage with the region of Cieszyn Silesia. A historically-distinct, mountainous region currently divided between Poland and Czechia, Cieszyn Silesia is home to Poland’s largest Lutheran population. Translating his experience of regional life and otherness into nationally-legible satire, Pilch defines Cieszyn Silesian identity as a strictly religious construct; the heroes of Pilch’s early novels agonize over the perceived incompatibility of Protestantism with wider Polish norms, just as they reveal an almost pathological need to prove their Polishness, often through allusions to the literary canon, both state-sanctioned and underground. I argue that Pilch’s work offers a particularly interesting case study in the continuities and contradictions of Poland’s post-1989 mental map, a reading aided by the employment of co-cultural communication theory, a framework for understanding representation strategies used by non-dominant groups.
My analysis of regionality in Pilch’s work is informed by my own work translating his 1993 novel, Spis cudzołożnic. Proza podróżna (The Register of Adulteresses: A Sentimental Journey, co-translated with Antonia Lloyd-Jones, forthcoming with Open Letter Books). As such, the talk will examine the specific challenges we faced translating the work for a contemporary Anglophone readership.
Jess Jensen Mitchell is a literary translator and researcher. She recently received her doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Still Nothing About Silesia’: Codifying Regional Family Memory in Polish Literature After 1989, asks how regionality is constructed within the Polish-language literary imagination. Her other scholarly interests include Polish diaspora communities in the United States, 20th-century Polish culture, historical fiction, and the idea and function of the public intellectual. She is an active member of the translation community, and her work has appeared in Two Lines, Asymptote, Hopscotch Translation, the Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories, and The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages (Legenda, forthcoming), and The Register of Adulteresses: A Sentimental Journey, co-translated with Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She produced the first season of Paraphrasis, the podcast on translation, and she is a 2026 resident in the Translators’ Collegium, generously funded by the Polish Book Institute.
