Patterns in the external history of Portuguese collections with translations of Polish literature (1855–2009)

This paper sets out to identify and analyse patterns in the external history of Portuguese collections with translations of Polish literature between 1855 and 2009. By doing so, it will provide preliminary insights into how these collections have presented Polish literature to the Portuguese readership and, ultimately, how they have contributed to the canonization of Polish authors/texts and the formation of cultural relations between the two (semi)peripheral languages/cultures concerned. To achieve these goals, in the first part relevant information regarding the corpus will be provided. Secondly, the methodology for analysing collections will be briefly elucidated. Thirdly, the results of the study will be presented. More specifically, the findings of preliminary analysis leading to statistical coding of peritextual elements will be described, six collection profiles will be examined and chronological patterns in the canonization of a given Polish author will be traced. Finally, the paper’s findings will be summarized and hypotheses to be tested in future research will be proposed.