Przekroj has an interview with a satirist, Krzysztof Piasecki, who is faced with a problem at work that many would envy: it’s too easy. I start a sketch, I start repeating what politicians have said and I don’t have to add anything because everyone’s already splitting their sides laughing…. I quoted deputy Pi?ka and people […]
Congratulations to Witold Gadomski, economics features writer for Gazeta Wyborcza who has just won a prize for fearlessly upholding the general right wing status quo in economics. No, really, I mean it. The prize is funded by the avowedly apolitical Polish National Bank, the assuredly neutral Association of Polish Journalists and the totally objective Reuters […]
Zyta Gilowska has been removed from the post of minister for finance because she is being investigated on suspicion of having lied when she declared that she had not worked with the secret services in Communist Poland. (The process is called “lustracja” in Polish.) She is feeling aggrieved. She has said that she has less […]
“He left the office and submerged himself in the crowds on Kampmannsgade, heading west across the Jorgen So and on to Danasvej. He turned right on Vodroffsvej before taking a left and winding up on Sankt Markus Plads where he bought a newspaper at a kiosk near the church. He continued up Julius Thomsens Plads, […]
On the evidence of the almost readable Sons and Lovers, David Herbert Lawrence is a truly dreadful writer. You could argue that his constant contradictions and endless revisions are an attempt to capture the complexity of the subconscious or you could argue that he did not know what he was on about and never re-read […]
Tadeusz Konwicki (80 years old today), author of Mala Apokalypsa (Minor Apocalypse, translated by Richard Lourie), is a very good writer indeed, on a par with DH Lawrence. Set during the war, Kilka dni wojny, o ktorej nie wiadomo czy byla (literally: A Few Days in a War About Which it is not Known if […]
Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza has an extended advertisement for an anti-plagiarism service whose name I won’t give here, since GW helpfully prints it several times in BLOCK CAPITALS. Why the irony? you ask. Why shouldn’t the newspaper print the company’s name in BLOCK CAPITALS since it is an advertisement? Because formally at least it is not […]
Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach (or “prime minister”) of Ireland, has an article in yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. While it is too boring to read, one thing does stand out: the man’s impeccable Polish (no translator is credited). Unless – perish the thought – a Polish politician or bureaucrat wrote it and Ahern just put his name to […]
Hardly do I open my yap about Gazeta Wyborcza’s occasionally one-sided picture of how great it is everywhere in the EU except Poland than economist and journalist Waldemar Kuczy?ski chimes in (on the pages of GW) on the same note. In today’s paper he writes “in the short term nothing can be done to stem […]
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 […]
