Arabic studies in Poland have been under way for more than a century.
At Jagiellonian University in Krakow, south of the Polish capital Warsaw, the field dates back to 1919, when pioneering Arabist Tadeusz Kowalski was appointed to lead the first department of Oriental philology in independent Poland.
Later 20th-century scholars including Tadeusz Lewicki, Maria Kowalska and Andrzej Zaborski helped make Krakow an important Central European centre for Arabic language, literature and Islamic studies.
That history ran through this year’s Warsaw International Book Fair, where Sharjah is guest of honour until Sunday. The emirate’s programme, organised by the Sharjah Book Authority, brought Polish academics, writers and translators into conversation with Emirati authors and artists on the cultural relationship between Poland and the Arab world.
Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, professor of Arabic literature at Jagiellonian University, pointed to Wacław Rzewuski, the 19th-century Polish aristocrat, traveller and orientalist who helped fund one of Europe’s early magazines devoted to Arab and Oriental studies.
“He was the first one who mastered Arabic,” she said during a panel discussion at the fair. “After that, he travelled to Vienna, where he established and funded the first orientalist magazine in Europe, in French and German, titled Treasures of the East.”
Michalak-Pikulska noted that Rzewuski later travelled to the Arabian Peninsula to buy Arabian horses and became known by the Arabic name Taj al-Fahr, meaning Crown of Honour.
She added that Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s great 19th-century Romantic poet, drew on the classical Arabic qasida form for his 1828 poem Farys (The Rider) and also worked with the poetry of Al Mutanabbi, the 10th-century Abbasid-era poet.
Emirati author Sultan Al Ameemi described those connections as an example of how literature can bridge cultures.
“Literature is one of the most effective ways societies discover shared human experiences beyond political and geographical boundaries,” he said.
He described Arabic’s influence on Polish as part of a longer movement between languages.
“The influence of Arabic on the Polish language is a migration of words shaped by centuries of exchange between peoples and civilisations,” he said.
Al Ameemi used the Polish example to make a broader point about the importance of translation and oral literature.
“The literary tradition itself extends back generations through oral poetry, storytelling and proverbs that formed an important part of social life in the UAE before the growth of publishing,” he said. “Although much of Emirati literature was documented in writing relatively recently, we are seeing the impact and history.”
Polish Arabist Sebastian Gadomski said he and his colleagues began by surveying Emirati literary production through Polish translations of key cultural works, including plays by Sharjah Ruler Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, which are available at the Polish book fair.
“We looked quickly at Emirati literary production and discovered that it is very rich,” he said. “It enriches the Arab experience of writing, the novel, theatre and different literary forms.
“For that reason, we focused on what His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan Al Qasimi offers the contemporary reader. We chose the plays in which he returns to history and teaches us how we can build our future through the lessons we take from what we have experienced in the past.”
Polish literature has also reached Arab readers through translation. Dr Yousef Sh’hadeh, an Egyptian academic, who lives in Poland and is a translator and lecturer at Jagiellonian University, translated into Arabic the works of Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of The Witcher, the Polish fantasy series that became a hit Netflix show starring Henry Cavill.
“I saw that Arabs received this culture and literature with great enthusiasm,” Sh’hadeh said.
“Even now, almost every day, I sometimes receive emails from Arab readers thanking me for the translation. I do not know them. They search for my address in many places so they can contact me and ask when the next volume will come out.”
Other forms of exchange took place beyond the book fair’s panel sessions at PGE Narodowy Stadium. At the National Library of Poland, Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, chairperson of Sharjah Book Authority, inaugurated the Polish edition of Folktales Reimagined, an international series that pairs Emirati and international artists with folk tales from each other’s cultures.
Polish illustrator Joanna Czaplewska worked on the Polish translation of Netifan, an Emirati tale about a childless sultan mocked for not having children. Czaplewska adorned the text with images of Polish landscapes and earthy colours, and replaced the palm branch in the story with a local apple tree.
“For me, it was quite challenging because the story is a little removed from Polish culture,” Czaplewska tells The National. “So I focused instead on the relationship between seven brothers and I wanted to show the landscape of Poland, the animals we can find here, the colours I feel close to.”
Emirati artist Fatima Alzarouni worked with the Polish children’s story King Popiel and the Mice, a legend about a ruler destroyed by greed.“You realise stories show us more of what we have in common than what separates us,” she says. “They are about what we all experience and feel, so in that sense Polish stories can feel Arabic to me.”
