The Polish Book Institute

Stefan Grabiński's novel Salamandra (“Salamander”) has been published on the Slovakian market.  The publication of the translation by Tomáš Horváth was supported by the Book Institute under the ©POLAND Translation Programme.

The book was published by Europa, a Bratislava-based publishing house. In recent years, the same publishing house has also published other works by Grabiński - all translated by Tomáš Horváth. These included two novels, namely Cień Bafometa ("Tieò Baphomet" ["Baphomet's Shadow"]) and Wyspa Itongo ("Ostrov Itongo" [“Itongo Island”]), as well as two short story selections "Màtvy priestor" and "Šialená záhrada".

Salamander is the first of the novels written by Stefan Grabiński. It tells the story of an occult researcher who begins to encounter the same suspicious people on the street again and again. After a while, he gets to know some of them and together they enter the world of secret knowledge and unexplainable phenomena. However, he is unable to determine which of the odd events he is beginning to experience are real and which are merely illusions.

Stefan Grabiński ( born 1887, died 1936) is Poland's most famous author of horror stories. In the first decades of the twentieth century, he published several collections of fantasy stories and several novels, and also wrote plays and theoretical works. His best-known works include short stories such as Demon ruchu (“The Motion Demon”), Problemat Czelawy (“The Problem of Professor Czelawa”), Maszynista Grot (“Engine Driver Grot”), and Muzeum dusz czyśćcowych (“'The Museum of Purgatorial Spirits”). In addition to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, his work was heavily influenced by parapsychology and the thought of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James.

***

The ©Poland Translation Programme is one of the Book Institute's flagship programmes. Its aim is to promote Polish literature around the world by providing financial support for the publication of Polish books in translation into foreign languages. Foreign publishers may use the funding grant to finance part of the work's publication costs, including, among other things, the translation of the work from Polish into another language, the purchase of copyright licences, and the printing of the book. In 2023 alone, we have subsidised 229 foreign editions of Polish books to be published by publishing houses from 46 countries, to which we have allocated almost PLN 5 million. In all editions of the programme, we have already subsidised a total of more than 3,000 translations of Polish books into foreign languages.

RP/IK