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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

Lem is best known for Solaris, of which there are two film adaptations. imho the book is better than both films, and the first film is better than the second.

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He is also known among programmers for The Cyberiad, which is available in an amazing English translation by Michael Kandel. The Cyberiad is a collection of tales about two Constructor robots who travel together and try to outdo each other at creating bizarre and often disastrous inventions to solve problems on different planets.

Edit: Here is a snippet in which Klaupacius challenges Trurl's latest invention, the electronic bard, to compose "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics," and gets a response: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/cyberiad.html

What is really amazing about this (and about the whole English translation by Kandel, but the poetry is particularly amazing) is that to me, as a native English speaker, this seems like it was written originally in English--not written originally in Polish and then translated into English.

Oh man. Definitely. It was upon reading this story years ago that I realized just how magical translations of stories could be. Lem's humor is so precise and dependent on wordplay and the puns are non-stop. I have no idea how Kandel (the translator) was able to bridge the gap between two languages that are so different. The English language results are as sharp and precise as anything anything an English speaker might come up with. Possibly better in some instances.

It seems to me that the English poem is indeed Kandel's original. There are very few similarities to the Polish version, other than the general theme. I found Lem's poem here: http://www.matematyka.wroc.pl/book/stanislaw-lem-zakochany-c...

> It seems to me that the English poem is indeed Kandel's original.

Hm, interesting. Still impressive since he had to write the poem.

I read a lot of Lem when I was a kid. Solaris is great, it was definitely one of my favorites. Here's another one that I liked a lot: Return from the stars. It's funny how he predicted a lot of modern technology spot on, but his hero goes to a post office to send a telegram to his friend on another continent.

I love his descriptions of the different phenomena like symmetriads. One of the few books I've read that describes a truly alien intelligence. The often recommend Blindsight being the other one I can think of.

Even in the first film there is only one brief scene that hints at the backstory that is a major part of the book.

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