Poles accepted Harold Pinter’s Nobel prize with good grace, despite the high hopes they had for local boy Ryszard Kapuściński. Old interviews with Pinter and newer ones with his translator were run in the papers and parallels were drawn between him and another local boy, playwright Sławomir Mrożek. Both men have lent their names to their respective languages: �like something out of Mrożek� is used to describe absurd situations.

Polish commentators were certainly far more gracious than Dorotea Bromberg, who complained that the award had gone to a dramatist, and not a “creator of literature.” Not many people will want to read a play, she complained. Her disappointment might be explained by the fact that she runs a company which publishes books.

A cynic might say that the generous amount of space given over to Pinter in newspapers is aimed at heading off any accusations of pettiness. A Pole denigrating Pinter would be open to accusations of allowing political differences to obscure his literary judgement: Pinter has excoriated Bush, Blair and the war on Iraq, in which Poland is an eager combatant.

“Poland,” in this context, means its politicians, who of course don’t see any actual combat, eagerly or not, in far away Iraq. Still, the question of continuing the war has not been an election issue. In fact, more attention has been paid to whether the grandfather of one of the candidates enlisted in the Wehrmacht or was conscripted. Yes, that’s “grandfather” and “Wehrmacht”: we’re talking about World War Two here. Only a cynic, or perhaps a Pinteresque playwright, might suggest that this concentration on the second world war to the exclusion of the war on Iraq is, indeed, “like something out of Mrożek.”