The Declaration of Independence in Poland

Abstract

The Polish translation of the Declaration of Independence can be found in an American history encyclopedia prepared by a group of historians from Warsaw University and first published in 1992. Among the alphabetically arranged entries, two documents appear in English alongside their Polish versions: the declaration and the Constitution. Although it is not identified as such, the translation of the declaration comes from an anthology of American thought in the Enlightenment, a collection of translations of representative texts by American political thinkers from the period of the Revolution, published in 1964.1 The text of the declaration was translated by Stanislawa Skrodzka. Though the 1964 volume was brought out by a major press specializing in scholarly books, it was released in a small (and characteristically unattractive looking) edition as part of a series of texts in the history of philosophy. Censoring even the most innocent publications was common practice in 1964, but there are no visible signs of the censor's interference in the texts despite the potentially subversive character of those that speak of independence, nationhood, rights, and so on, always very sensitive topics in Poland given the country's long history of subjugation. My guess is that in 1964 a collection of philosophy texts was probably deemed too obscure and insignificant for the censors to worry about. That translation of the Declaration of Independence was reprinted ten years later in a monograph on the origins of the United States by the Warsaw University historian Izabella Rusinowa, a work of objective and sound scholarship that presented a history very different from what six years earlier was still the official version. In 1968, one of the darkest years in the struggle of Poles against communism, volume 5 of a ten-volume history of the world prepared by a team of scholars from the Soviet Academy of Science had appeared; the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the origins of the American Revolution explained the Declaration of Independence as an antifeudal and antimonarchistic document establishing republican freedoms and privi-