I base my translations on the Polish Klechdy: starożytne podania i powieści ludowe, collected and edited by Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki (1807–1879), second, enlarged edition, published in Poland, Warszawa, w Drukarni Jana Jaworskiego, 1851.
The first edition of Klechdy: Starożytne Podania i Powieści Ludowe came out in 1836, and interestingly the title of the first version was Klechdy, starożytne podania i powieści ludu polskiego i Rusi – Fables: Ancient Folk Tales and Narratives of Poland and Russia (Rus), but the title of the second or third edition did not mention Poland and Russia.
The 1836 collection was translated into German and published in 1839 as Polnische Volkssagen und Märchen. Aus dem Polnischen des des K. W. Woycicki von Friedrich Heinrich Lewestam.
Wójcicki mentions in the second edition that most of the 1836 collection was also translated into French in 1837 and parts were translated into Czech in 1840.
Several of the stories were translated into English by John Theophilus Naaké and published in London in 1874 in Slavonic Fairy Tales: Collected and Translated from the Russian, Polish, Servian, and Bohemian. You can see some of those translations on Fairytalez.com, an online collection of “fairy tales, folk tales, and fables.”
However, I cannot find a full English translation of Wójcicki’s Klechdy.
Here, I’m translating only the stories I cannot find in English and that I find interesting.
Not sure why Google Books isn’t making the 1851 volume publicly available, as it should be in the public domain, though newer versions of the tales are still being printed, with the most recent one published in 2021.
If you know Polish, you can read the third, 1876 edition, with beautiful engravings through MBC (Mazowiecka Biblioteka Cyfrowa) – Masovian Digital Library. Mind you, it takes a moment to download.
