Chapter 8 Boys’ Friendship or Something More? Re-Examining Janusz Korczak’s King Matt the First and Its English Translations
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Abstract
This chapter discusses an influential and culturally significant children’s novel Król Maciuś Pierwszy (King Matt the First) (1922) by Janusz Korczak, a pen name for Henryk Goldschmit. The analysis focuses on the representation of friendship between the main child protagonists and how it is modeled in the novel’s English translation. The depiction of these main child characters and their friendship in the Polish source text is interpreted as a covert and overlooked controversy, introducing elements of gender bending and non-normativity with reference to social roles and gender identity. Further, the chapter shows how these potentially controversial aspects are mediated in the novel’s translations into English. In light of a universal observation that ideologically “troubling” elements of the source text are likely to become the subject of mediating practices in translation for children, it is hypothesized that if some elements of the said relationships were not considered suitable for child audiences, they would have been mitigated in early translations, when the acceptance for censoring changes in translated children’s literature was greater than today.