What Polish translators brought into the theory of translation in the last thirty years merits a synthetic presentation. Here we chose, amidst the “memes of translation” (cf. Chesterman 1997), the issue of “strangeness” in translation, also termed “exotisation” or “light in language and culture”. To preserve strangeness is for Antoine Berman an essentially ethical act in translation, the position shared by the author. For her, two ways of translating a passage from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, and a passage from Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le metro, represent, in the typology proposed by Zygmunt Grosbart, a type of ‘careful’ translation and the ‘brave’ translation type, respectively.