Based on theatricality, humour and camp aesthetics, the novel Lubiewo (2005) by the Polish writer Michał Witkowski recounts the tragicomic lives and adventures of Polish queers under Communism. One of the main features of the novel is the meaning-bearing nicknames of the characters, which result from the camp practice of “queer renaming”. This relies on transforming or substituting male proper names with ironic and witty female nicknames. The paper analyses the German, French, English and Czech translations of the novel to explain the strategies used to render such “talking nouns” in new linguistic-cultural contexts.

Lubiewo (2005) by Michał Witkowski presents a particularly high number of cultural elements related to the last decades of the Polish People’s Republic (1952–1989), which far from serving exclusively as a historical background, turn the latter into one of the novel’s main characters. The present paper aims at investigating and comparing the way these elements, whose translation is known to be problematic, have been transferred into the Russian ( Любиево 2007) and English ( Lovetown 2010) translations.