The Olesnicki Episode, the second part of Anna Stanislawska’s autobiographical Orphan Girl, is a remarkable scholarly, translational, and dramaturgical achievement. Introducing the historical contexts of Stanislawska’s masterpiece, Barry Keane writes her biography into Polish history’s most important events, counterpointed by the themes of love, oppression, and personal struggle. Keane’s choice to keep the strong rhythmical pattern and the meaningful rhyming scheme of the source reminds one of the work’s literary imperatives, while his contemporary English vocabulary pushes the work toward the present moment, bridging the past and present, and conveying the unique rawness and honesty of Stanislawska’s voice.
-Dr. Kasia Lech, Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts, School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University

After the publication of The Aesop Episode, I can only welcome Barry Keane’s superb translation of the second episode of Anna Stanislawska’s Orphan Girl, a valuable, long-lost seventeenth-century poetic text documenting women’s writing in the early modern period. Keane, a poet in his own right, should be applauded not only for successfully rendering the poem into convincingly modern, idiomatic, and highly readable English, but also for his admirable contextualization of the work with an informative introduction and commentary.
- Jerzy Jarniewicz, Professor of British Language and Culture, The University of Lódz