"La Terre de la grande promesse" – the French edition of "Ziemia Obiecana" ("The Promised Land") by Władysław Stanisław Reymont

Abstract

Danuta Knysz-Tomaszewska (Université Paris IV Sorbonne, University of Warsaw) and Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg (Université Paris IV Sorbonne), editors of the publication entitled La Terre de la grande promesse, have prepared a French-Polish edition of Ziemia Obiecana (“The Promised Land”) by Władysław Stanisław Reymont. The publishing initiative, so important for the promotion of Polish culture abroad, has been developed jointly by two institutions: the Interdisciplinary Center for Central European Studies at the Sorbonne (CIRCE) in Paris and the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University, with financial support from l’Association Française d’Action Artistique. The two-hundred-and-fifty-pages-long edition of La Terre de la grande promesse is not a translation of the entire novel by Reymont. The French publication is, however, an innovative, interdisciplinary literary, scientific and cultural collage, which consists of: fragments of Ziemia Obiecana translated by Olivier Gautreau, papers on literature and film, and the iconographic section titled Łódź wczoraj i dziś (“Łódź Yesterday and Today”). Łódź, after more than a hundred years since the release of Ziemia Obiecana, has once again become a participant in the interaction between cultures, this time the Polish and the French – La Terre de la grande promesse represented the Polish literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century during the Polish Culture Season in Paris.