Abstract:
Adam Mickiewicz’s Sir Thaddeus, or the Last Lithuanian Foray — Polish national epic poem, written in the Romantic period — is a masterpiece, considered to be untranslatable. It contains and codifies certain “patterns of Polishness”: stereotypical depictions of everything that are typically Polish, and indivisibly connected with the Polish (cultural, historical, literary, political) context and environment. In the article it is asserted that a number of terms and depictions, which, in a certain culture are considered as stereotypical, in a translation change their status: they are neither schematic nor obvious anymore (they lose their stereotypy). The process of “destereotypization” takes place mainly because of the transfer into another language and into another cultural context, and because of the receiver’s (reader’s) different cultural education, who interprets the text from a completely different, new point of view.
