Orphan Girl – A Transaction, or an Account of the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by way of Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685. The Aesop Episode

Barry Keane, lecturer in Translation and Comparative Studies in the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, is the author of books on the Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski, the modernist Skamander poets, and several volumes of poetry. His forthcoming book, to be published with Intellect Ltd., is entitled Irish Drama in Poland: Staging and Reception, 1900 – 2000.

• Foreword xiAcknowledgments xiiiIntroduction 1Orphan Girl 17Commentary 107Bibliography 121Index 125

"No other work of early modern Polish literature can be compared with Anna Stanislawska’s poetic account of her life. What is more — no woman in Polish literature published such a sincere and artistically valuable confession until the twentieth century. Barry Keane has an exceptional talent to render all the beauty of old poetry into English, and has successfully captured the metrical and rhyming features of the poem, and its rhetorical and performative qualities, in a translation that is both faithful and readable."