Todays’s Rzeczpospolita has a translation of part of yesterday’s Guardian editorial. Interestingly, Rzeczpospolita leaves out a few sentences from the Guardian piece without following the convention of putting in ellipsis to mark the ommission. Also, the Polish newspaper translates the original “the old left” with the words “extreme left-wingers.”

The Guardian suggests that Chavez is popular in Europe mainly because he is anti-Bush (perish the thought that it is because of any positive contibution Chavez has made to Venezuela) but that’s not enough for Rzeczpospolita. The original reads:

To some extent, Mr Chavez is a beneficiary of the crude logic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” [my italics].

The Rzeczpospolita translation reads:

Mr Chavez’s popularity in Europe stems from the principle “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”

This is the kind of distortion that used to take place under the communists in Poland. For instance, in a translation of Langston Hughes’s poem “Brass Spittoons,” which apeared in the Polish press in 1948, the line

“And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life”

was changed to

“The slime in hotel spittoons
That’s my life.”

The original, though harshly crtitical of America’s treatment of its underclass, was just not critical enough so the translator intervened to change this vision of misery from a “part of my life” to “my life.” It’s good to see that Poland has not blindly abandoned everything associated with communism.