Solaris: What It's About & Best Translation
Lem's masterpiece of the unknowable — and the remarkable story of its English translation
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Solaris follows psychologist Kris Kelvin as he arrives at a research station on the oceanic planet Solaris, where scientists are studying the planet's mysterious ocean. The ocean appears to be a sentient entity capable of probing the deepest recesses of the human mind, manifesting physical forms from the scientists' memories.
Translation Comparison at a Glance
| Translation | Readability | Accuracy | Tone | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kilmartin/Cox (1970) | High | Good | Fluent and atmospheric | First-time readers and general audiences |
#1 — Solaris: A Novel — trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970)
- Readability: Reads fluently and captures the atmosphere and intellectual texture of Lem's original.
- Accuracy: Twice removed from the Polish; Lem identified distortions introduced via the French intermediary.
- Tone: Preserves the philosophical rigour and refusal of resolution that define the novel.
- Accessibility: The edition through which millions of English readers first encountered Solaris.
And yet the Kilmartin-Cox translation is a good novel in English. It reads fluently, captures the atmosphere and intellectual texture of Lem's original, and has introduced the book to millions of readers who could not read Polish or French. The Andrei Tarkovsky film (1972) — still one of the great science fiction films — was made from it. The Steven Soderbergh film (2002) derives from it. It is the Solaris that English readers know. Lem's irritation was justified on scholarly grounds, but the translation has proven itself on literary ones. The Mariner Books edition is the one in wide circulation and the one to read. Bottom line: The only widely available English edition and the version through which Solaris became a classic in English.
Alessandro Juliani's nuanced performance captures the eerie, philosophical tone of Lem's masterpiece, and the Kilmartin/Cox translation is widely regarded as the most faithful English version.
Listen on Audible →Which translation is right for you?
- Choose Kilmartin/Cox if you want the only widely available English edition and the version through which the novel became a classic of world literature in English.
About the Translators
Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (1970, Walker and Company / Mariner Books): British translators who worked not from Lem's Polish but from Joël Martineau's 1966 French translation — itself translated from the Polish — making their version a translation twice removed from the original. Joanna Kilmartin (not to be confused with Terence Kilmartin, the translator of Proust) was a French-to-English translator; Cox worked in Polish and French. Lem, who read English, was vocal about his dissatisfaction with the result: he identified passages where the French translation had already distorted his meaning, and where the English compounded the distortion. The names Lem had coined for the ocean's formations — the mimoids, the symmetriads, the asymmetriads — came into English through this double filter. Nevertheless, and against Lem's judgement, the Kilmartin-Cox version is the translation through which the novel achieved its status as a classic of world literature in English.
Themes
The limits of human knowledge. The novel's most sustained intellectual argument is a parody of science: Solaristics — the academic discipline devoted to studying the ocean — has produced an enormous literature of competing theories, elaborate taxonomies, and failed explanatory frameworks, none of which has succeeded in establishing any coherent understanding of what the ocean is or what it does. Lem presents this not as a failure of individual scientists but as a structural impossibility: the categories human beings bring to the investigation of the universe are the categories of human experience, and when something genuinely exceeds those categories, the investigation produces noise. The library of Solaristics is a monument to the limits of knowledge.
Radical otherness and the impossibility of contact. The ocean is not hostile to the researchers; it is not benevolent; it is not indifferent in any sense that implies awareness of their presence. It simply is — an enormously complex, evidently responsive, apparently purposive system that human beings cannot integrate into any framework of meaning. When it begins producing the "visitors" — physical materialisations of figures from the researchers' memories — even this seems less like communication than like a mirror held up to human beings: it shows them themselves, not itself. The novel's most radical claim is that genuine contact with radical otherness may be impossible in principle.
Guilt and memory as the ocean's material. What the ocean produces from Kelvin is his dead wife Harey — a perfect physical replica of the woman who killed herself ten years before, following an argument with him that he cannot remember clearly enough to understand. The "visitor" does not know she is a copy; she has Harey's memories up to a point but not beyond; she is bewildered by her own experience. Kelvin's relationship with this Harey — his terror, his guilt, his growing tenderness, his final understanding that he has been given something he does not deserve — is the novel's emotional core, and it suggests that what the ocean produces is not what it intends but what it finds: the deepest things in the people it encounters.
Key Characters
Kris Kelvin — the psychologist narrator who arrives at the research station to find it in a state of barely suppressed terror; rational, trained to observe, and completely unprepared for what the ocean has prepared for him. His narration has the quality of a man trying to think clearly under conditions of extreme psychological stress — he almost succeeds, and his failure is the novel's most honest element.
Harey — Kelvin's dead wife, materialised by the ocean; she has no idea that she is a copy; she experiences her existence with complete sincerity, including her growing awareness that something is wrong with her. Her relationship with Kelvin — the guilt it evokes in him, the tenderness it produces despite the impossibility of the situation — is the novel's most morally searching element.
Snow (Snaut) — one of the two surviving researchers; cynical, frightened, and inclined to drink; he serves as Kelvin's main source of information about what has been happening at the station, but his information is incomplete and his judgement compromised by months of exposure to his own "visitor." He is the novel's most sympathetically ordinary human being.
The ocean — the planet's single vast living organism, covering the entire surface of Solaris; the novel's true subject; never described from the inside, always observed from without; evidently doing something but impossible to characterise in any terms that would constitute understanding. Its presence in the novel is as a figure of irreducible mystery that does not yield to scientific investigation.
Recommended Sources
For further academic reading on Lem and Solaris:
- Science Fiction Studies (DePauw University) — the primary scholarly journal for science fiction; the essential venue for Lem scholarship and for Solaris's place in the tradition of philosophical science fiction.
- Extrapolation (University of Texas at Brownsville) — one of the oldest science fiction journals; key for Lem's relationship to the American and British SF traditions he criticised and engaged.
- Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (Science Fiction Foundation, UK) — important for the broader European context of Lem's work and its reception in Western science fiction culture.
The Kilmartin-Cox translation (Mariner Books) is the only widely available English version of Solaris. Lem was correct that it is not ideal — it is twice removed from his Polish, and the distortions accumulated in two translations are real. But it is the translation through which the novel became one of the most discussed works of science fiction in English, and no competing direct-from-Polish version has replaced it. It is the edition to read.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Solaris about?
Solaris follows psychologist Kris Kelvin as he arrives at a research station on the oceanic planet Solaris, where scientists are studying the planet's mysterious ocean. The ocean appears to be a sentient entity capable of probing the deepest recesses of the human mind, manifesting physical forms from the scientists' memories.
Is Solaris hard to read?
Solaris can be challenging due to its philosophical themes and complex narrative. The Kilmartin/Cox translation is noted for its readability, making it accessible for most readers.
Which Solaris translation is best?
The Kilmartin/Cox translation is the standard English edition and the one to read.
Kilmartin/Cox vs a direct Polish translation — which should I choose?
No widely available direct-from-Polish version exists; Kilmartin/Cox remains the only edition in circulation and the one through which the novel achieved classic status in English.
Which translation is easiest to read?
The Kilmartin/Cox version reads fluently and captures the intellectual texture of Lem's original.
Which translation is most accurate?
It is twice removed from the Polish original, yet it remains the translation through which millions of readers discovered the novel.
Why was the standard English Solaris translated from French rather than Polish?
Kilmartin and Cox worked from a 1966 French translation; Lem was vocal about the resulting distortions but the edition still became the definitive English text.
This guide is based on reading the translation and reviewing scholarly commentary. Last reviewed: June 2026.
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