Radical Polish books to add to your reading list | Hacker News Reader

Radical Polish books to add to your reading list

calvertjournal.com

91 pointsaxiomdata31651 comments

Stanislaw Lem (one of his books is on the list) is a fantastic author.

If you are a logophile, I highly recommend reading "The Futurological Congress".

Polish is a language where you can conjugate everything into something else (nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, nice words into curse words), and Lem wrote a book that plays off of this linguistic peculiarity in a way that is hilarious.

... what's even MORE beautiful is the translator had to take that and translate it into similar wordplay in English. Huge respect for the translators doing this work.

Paradoxically, I've never brought myself to like Lem's science-fiction books, but enjoyed his two non-science-fiction books (one of them even non-fiction):

1. Hospital of the Transfiguration: <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251632.Hospital_of_the_T...>

2. Highcastle: A Remembrance: <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251630.Highcastle>

Have you tried 'Fiasco'? I've reread that a couple of times.

A great book.

So Hospital of Transfiguration is an absolutely incredible - if haunting - book, and as much as I love Lem's Sci-Fi, that one is a masterpiece as well. Also I have no idea if they are even available in English, but the two follow ups to it, "Wśród umarłych"(Among the dead) and "Powrót"(Return) are also worth reading, even though Lem never agreed to republish them, as he only agreed to write them to get around the communist censorship. I think from the perspective of time it's easy to see throught the pages written clearly to appease the communist censors, and end up with a worthy follow up to the first book.

Lem is easily one of my favorites for the sheer ingenuity of the stories.

> Polish is a language where you can conjugate everything into something else (nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, nice words into curse words), and Lem wrote a book that plays off of this linguistic peculiarity in a way that is hilarious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologisms_of_Stanis%C5%82aw_L...

A Pole here, this list is not a good one.

I read a plenty of polish books, here's my recommendations:

- IMHO the best book of the recent Polish Nobel Prize winner (Olga Tokarczuk) is "Flights" and "Primeval and Other Times". The "Drive your plow.." is one of the worst really. It's because of its pro-ecologic and feminism topics which make it popular.

- The author, that HN would definitely like is Jacek Dukaj. Not many of his books were translated, unfortunately. Look forward especially to the "Ice": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(Dukaj_novel)

- My favourite polish fiction author is Wiesław Myśliwski: https://www.amazon.com/Stone-Upon-Wieslaw-Mysliwski-ebook/dp... I doubt whether you will enjoy it, his books are about dying world of polish countryside.

- The author, that HN would definitely like is Jacek Dukaj

This. And my recommendation is "Black Oceans" - for years now I'm shocked why noone made movie from it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charne_oceany

These aren't the interesting kind of radical. Just feminist books filled with power/struggle fantasies.

Ugh, maybe some of them are. But Kapuścinski and Lem for sure are not.

What do people think in Poland about the truth value of what Kapuścinski wrote?

Maybe they're radical in that they don't care about you, and what you think books should be about.

But let's turn this around - have you actually read any of them, or are you just saying "meh, feminism, not my thing" and discarding them out of hand?

Based on the ones I've read, both "Dromedaries" and "His Masters Voice" are very much radical, especially if you read them in their historical context. You can certainly argue that ultimately, the topics and stories are a bit more familiar nowadays than they were then, but they're still quite thought-provoking. (If you read one of those two, I'd go with "Dromedaries". Lem is many things, but certainly not an easy read)

I think the url ("/queer-feminist-sci-fi-books-polish-literature") is a more accurate description than "Radical Polish books to add to your reading list."

But Stanisław Lem doesn't quite fit.

There are a zillion books out there, most of them crap. So simply "try reading them" does not really work, there have to be some good reasons to pick up a book.

Sure. There also have to be good reasons to dismiss something as "not radical". Nobody is asking OP to read all books recommended on the Internet. But if they'd like to spout opinions about them, I think "have you even read it" is a valid request.

If they are being described as belonging to a certain type of books, I don't think you have to read them to have an opinion. Like if a book is described as "feminist", you can have a pretty good idea of its contents.

Not a single one about square roots (and the related family of functions) or molecules with unpaired valence electrons

As a Pole, I only like Lem from this list of authors.

I dislike most of Polish literature. Most of modern Polish literature tries to be edgy too hard. Older literature is too political, up to the point that they usually forget that it supposed to be entertaining besides raising political issues. That's my opinion at least.

Except Scifi and Fantasy of course - Lem, Witcher. I wish we read those back in the day as part of the curriculum.

Unfortunately, works of one of my favorite writers - and ones that people on HN would appreciate - aren't translated into English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Zajdel

To quote another author whose work was also never translated(Jarosław Grzędowicz):

"Native English speakers generally don't accept translations done by anyone who's not a native English speaker as well. Unfortunately there are very few native English speakers who are at the same time experts in Polish, and it so happens that all four of them are currently busy fulfilling their careers as lumberjacks".

Given the rather large number of Polish Americans, I would think finding people who are fluent in English and Polish wouldn't be all that hard.

It takes the cultural back-and-forth for that work out, along with a few other factors. Most Polonia (as we call Polish-Americans) are firmly set in the US and usually don’t get higher education in Poland. This means that while they understand the language, they don’t really “get” the temperament and are losing a grip on the culture. I say this from personal experience and upbringing. Polonia also tend to be working-class.

As a dilettante/temp Polish/English translator I would also say it really requires a very specific mix of values and circumstances. To pull off a quality translation of a piece of literature one has to put almost as much energy into it as it takes to write to begin with. It’s a huge undertaking, with not that big a payoff and it requires specific values, commitment and education. I’m surprised such people exist, really.

To add to the sibling comment:

I was born abroad myself and I often feel that I lack cultural context.

I also have friends and relatives who grew up abroad and while their Polish is perfect in terms of grammar and pronunciation, they use almost no idioms.

The kind of fluency needed to translate doesn't come with memetically bad "Polonia" polish (even if it's a bit of exaggeration). Especially with works that use polish language to its fullest (like Lem) or reference culture and events that are local (infamous example was the first Witcher game, but also Witcher novels - the english translation of the game was much, much weaker content than the polish original which requires familiarity with polish politics 2000-2007).

So you need a combo of american poet, fluent polish linguist, and possibly historian and/or anthropologist. Tall order. Sometimes it can be smoothed over by adding considerable appendices (something that accompanied first releases of Harry Potter in Polish, for example, explaining untranslatable puns and reasons for translating things in specific way) but again, not a trivial thing to do.

>Native English speakers generally don't accept translations done by anyone who's not a native English speaker as well

Is it common practice in Poland (or anywhere else) for people to translate from their native language into another language? I have personally never heard of commercial translations being done by non-natives in any language, but I'd be very interested to learn about such a place.

> Is it common practice in Poland (or anywhere else) for people to translate from their native language into another language?

I would say it's uncommon, but I think that after some digging I could maybe find a few examples of self-published work translated to English by the author.

Off the top of my head I can only think of examples of books translated into Esperanto, but I assume this doesn't count.

Historically Joseph Conrad was a Polish native speaker, but wrote exclusively in English so there's that.

Cute, but completely preposterous. Vast numbers of Polish people speak perfect English, including my husband. It’s probably just not commercially interesting to translate and market.

Of course this was said in jest. He just didn't think his work would do well commercially if translated.

“feminist eco-thriller” is pretty much the very last thing I want to read these days.

Our neighborhood book club read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and I was not impressed.

I'll inform the news media immediately.

I read part of this - if I remember correctly it was reviewed in the Economist, and anyway they used to have lots of good recommendations for translated fiction. I couldn't get into it either, but I think it's the kind of book you need to read a lot of before it becomes interesting. I may try again just because this has jogged my memory.

In the afterward of "The Name of the Rose", Umberto Eco talks about how he wanted to filter for a certain kind of reader with whom the story would resonate, and does so by making the first hundred pages very difficult to read. Overall, the book is worth it in that case (although he might be joking). So sometimes its worth trying to press onward, even when the material is not enjoyable immediately.

Huh. I didn't find the first hundred pages of The Name of the Roes notably boring or difficult or anything. I do think literature generally selects against readers who aren't prepared for it. Like how it's hard to get into a new genre of music, especially the first time you start trying to branch out in that way. Don't understand its idioms, its musical language, and haven't trained your ear for it, et c. Like trying to go from a childhood of listening to only radio top-40s to appreciating classical music or jazz or something. It's jarring and off-putting at first, and may even seem silly or bad.

Towards the end of his life Stanisław Lem was asked about Tokarczuk (the recent Polish Nobel prize winner) and said the following:

"Tokarczuk offended my rationality to such an extent that I wanted to write a polemic, but I decided that it wasn't worth it, because it would mean I have to read her entire book."

Funny how famous writers often seem to be each other’s harshest critics. Was this in reference to any particular book of hers? I read Drive Your Plow and it seemed like fairly standard mystery noir fiction, certainly nothing to write a polemic about

He said that about a non-fiction book by her, an essay about a school reading realist Polish novel from XIX century. In Poland, being a good fiction writer is correlated with being a good literary critic as much as in any other country.

DYPOtBotD on the other hand is pretty much a whodunit, as such there is a certain threshold to impress book club readers, I guess

Flights is a great piece of writing though. Definitely not for the Lem crowd, but I guess there are weirdos like myself who like both.

Hunting in Poland is not like in the USA, where it is an outdoor activity generally accepted by most of population. Many if not most people would want to totally outlaw it. When you ask them if they are aware about boar damages to crops or do they think if the hunted meat is less cruel than farmed meat, they are totally unaware in how horrible conditions some of farmed animals are raised.

Regarding boars hunters are currently somewhat counter-productive, given that they are known to feed the animals.

And breed them.

They also don't follow necessary sanitation guidelines, necessary due to African Swine Fever rampaging through Poland - which results in hunts increasing danger of ASF instead of reducing it.

As someone who lived for years with year-long problems with boars.

Hunters do jack shit about them. When we had concrete overpopulation problems, it wasn't hunters who dealt with it, it was organized by forest management officials as dedicated culling action, methodical and directed.

The reason people are annoyed by "hunters" is that they are out of control, often drunk on the hunt, create danger to other people (lots and lots of cases with people killed by hunters, including causing danger in build up communities), and if you try to stop them, expect to be intimidated with guns and to see your pets shot.

Then you have hunting lobby in current govt get itself legal right to organize hunt on your land without you allowing it (and again, try to stop the mafia...)

So, yeah, zero sympathy for hunting as it is done now.

“This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski is a must read.

See: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/09/12/the-world-of-tadeus...

Borowski was a political dissident imprisoned at Auschwitz, and he explained how anyone can normalize such an experience.

A new book with Tadeusz’s work has recently been published and translated into English called “Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories”.

You can view details here but it is also available on Amazon: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300116908/here-our-ausch...

Lem was the first to elevate sci-fi to the level of proper literature, if you like sci-fi with more philosophical themes there are many, but for those who don't know him perhaps His Masters Voice, Solaris and Eden are good books to start with.

Unlike some here I’m reading Drive Your Plow at the moment and really enjoying it. Recommend trying for yourself before taking the negative comments too seriously.

Why is this on HN?

Unexpected things like this are welcome on HN when they're interesting and not closely correlated with other stuff that appears here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hi Dang, I think this is the best thread to ask you about that: didn't you have a quote from Bruno Schultz in your 'about' section some time ago? How did you come across him?

It was most likely from the great and idiosyncratic Martin Seymour Smith. I used to spend hours combing through his masterpiece, which was an encyclopedia of 20th century literature which he produced single-handedly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thanks, I'll add "The Guide to Modern World Literature" to my reading list (and I guess it will transitively keep this list filled for the next decade or so)

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