At the beginning of the 1990s, Szewczenko, who had become Professor in Byzantine Studies at Harvard (and changed the spelling of his name to Ševčenko), explained to Peter Davison: ‘Those post-war days. Her son, Konstanty Jeleński, who was 24 in 1946, had a friend of the same age – Polish-born Ukrainian Ihor Szewczenko. Jeleńska corresponded with Orwell, elucidating some passages with his help, and was so fascinated by the fable that she tried to organise its translation into other languages as well. 5000 copies of her translation were published at the very end of 1946 by ‘Swiatpol’, the League of Poles Abroad based in London. The book's first translator was Teresa Jeleńska, the wife of a Polish diplomat and a ‘”grande dame” in Italo-English literary circles’. The story of Animal Farm in translation begins with its Polish edition. She is a trustee of The Orwell Society and Editor of the Orwell Society Journal. She is a translator of Animal Farm into Russian (first published in 2001) and the author of the award winning first Russian biography of Orwell (St Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2017). Masha Karp is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in relations between Russia and the West. This excerpt is from Masha Karp's upcoming book, Orwell and Russia, due to be published by Bloomsbury Academic.
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