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Anna Swirszczyńska, in her original drama Orfeusz. Sztuka w trzech aktach (Orpheus. Play in Three Acts), a powerful and innovative post-war rewrite of the myth, first performed in 1946, transforms the myth and its essential features. Love, death and poetry are no longer the triad par excellence of the narrative, and Orpheus and Eurydice become fully aware of the own actions and choices. This update of the story involves a recent past which, after the war, required elaboration of mourning and grief, tending towards an ethics of awareness that frees the individual from guilt, and at the same time, opens up a path of hope with new prospects and new goals, notwithstanding fate, and overcoming fear.

The paper is an analysis of Jan Dorman’s theatre practice in the context of the classical tradition. It examines the archival collections of The Theatre Institute documenting the collaboration of Jan Dorman with Anna Świrszczyńska on the staging of O kulawym bogu Hefajstosie (“The Lame God Hephaestus”), Świrszczyńska’s radio play. The extant  correspondence between the creators of the production and the director’s copies permit us to explore and analyse the ways in which classical antiquity inspired Dorman’s work. Although Dorman never adapted any ancient Greek text to the stage, his practice indicates a strong presence of the classical tradition, in particular the Greek comedy, in his mode of theatre.

This article reconstructs Czesław Miłosz's multiple translations into English, done between 1983 and 2002, of the Polish author Anna Świrszczyńska's poetry as a case study contrasting the ideological underpinnings of his translations prior to the fall of Communism in 1989 with those he presented after, when literature could cross more freely between the two cultures. Because Miłosz's translations of Świrszczyńska's poetry appeared in three different versions, two books for the American audience and one book for the Polish audience, it is possible to track a process of travel at work behind his translations. The three books demonstrate how translated texts often circulate in our globalized literary culture, first when a work of literature crosses from one language to another (from source to target culture), then when knowledge of the translation recrosses back to the original culture. This process of travel shows that translation from a \"minor\" language such as Polish to a \"major\" language such as English is often used in an attempt to preserve, broaden, and canonize the source literature, regardless of the translation's effects in the target culture.