Here are translated (badly – the Polish language has changed and I don’t have a historical dictionary), edited snippets of a letter from Catherine II to her Polish – ahem – subjects in 1768 after the Bar Confederation. “…Our army in the Commonwealth of Poland, for the keeping of peace … Our friendly, allied nation […]
Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes for the Guardian on Polish matters. She is certainly on top of her brief. Check this out from August 1st: “Are Poles in Britain really starting to go home? Right now, I have no plans to do so, but you never know.” Note the effortless shift from “Poles” to “me.” She continues […]
Susan Bassnett is a leading representative of the translators are great school of thought, a school which holds that translators are as good – oh, hell, why not come out and say it – actually better than original (or rather, “original”) writers. I wouldn’t deny that translation is a creative activity – not after working […]
Here’s the RTE (Irish TV and Radio) news website today. It was also on air in more or less the same form: Employers earlier warned that future investment by multinational companies could disappear with many job losses if they were forced to recognise unions. No big deal there, just the usual threats. But here’s where […]
Further, it is obvious that since form is a principle of choice […], new forms will reveal new things in reality, new connections, and naturally, the more the internal coherence of these new forms is stressed in relation to others, the more rigorous they will be. Michel Butor, “The Novel as Research,” translated by Gerald […]
From the BBC news website today on Sony’s decision to prosecute people who import certain goods into Europe: “Critics of Sony’s approach feel that the electronics giant is preventing gamers in Europe from getting their hands on Play Station 3s early, even if they have to pay a hefty premium.” Critics of Sony don’t think. […]
A soap maker named Unilever is trying to start a debate about beauty in Poland. The back page of this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza is entirely given over to an advertis– sorry, a manifesto about “real beauty.” (Fair play to GW: it is clearly marked advertisement.) Straight away there is something suspiciously close to a tautology: […]
I found this today in the New York Times: We don�t use future tense, we don�t use passive voice, we don�t have long chapters. (We’re not too keen on definite article either.) The speaker is Diane Steele, publisher of the “…for Dummies” guide to stuff. I knew the philistines had it in for the passive […]
Nie (“No”) is a weekly current affairs magazine. Its editor is Jerzy Urban, the mouthpiece of communist Poland in the 1980s. The editorial line is firmly anti-Catholic church and the present, right wing government is not in favour either. Its journalists try sometimes a little too hard to defend the legacy of the People’s Republic […]
Back in January I took a look at a dodgy Irish Times article on Poles travelling between Poland and Ireland. Six months later (17-18/6/06) Gazeta Wyborcza takes on a similar subject in an article entitled “Warsaw-Dublin, flight nr. EI 363, departure time 12.15.” It’s shorter and more factual, with less of what was contemptuously refered […]
