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October 09, 2007
O'Brien Leads, Sosnowski Follows
A character called Jakub Sosnowski has gone into business in Poland selling cog notes for ignoramuses. That is: you pay him and he tells you what such and such a book is about or what such and such a record is like. In this way you can shine at social gatherings to which you have been invited thanks to your stupendous new wealth rather than your depths of culture and sophistication.
Irish writer Flann O'Brien was on to this back in the 1920s or 30s. He offered a book-reading service. For a fee he would so mangle a book as to make it look like you had actually read it. For a higher fee he would underline passages, break the spine, add comments in the margins...
O'Brien was satirising snobbery but there is no suggestion that Sosnowski is anything other than a businessman. But save your money. If you want to know what to think of, for example, this year's "Nike" award winner, Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli (Treatise on Shelling Beans) by Wiesław Myśliwski you can always avail of the services of myself.
Posted by hgrodsk at October 9, 2007 11:33 AM
Comments
From your other post on the shelling beans book (which I carefully avoided after listening to the author on the radio):
"In other words, the point of the game was not to win, as is the object of all other games."
All other games?"
I don't know what the original was but if it was każdy in some form, in my experience każdy that word doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in Polish as in English.
That is, każdy X means something like "almost every X" or even "a typical X". I hadn'y noticed wszystkie behaving exactly the same way but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Last week on TV I saw a news feature on an alleged increase in the number of marriages taking place. The announcer said something like (I forget the exact words in Polish) "We're saying 'I do' more and more often." Which apparently made sense in Polish where it meant something like "more and more of us are saying 'I do'" rather than what it meant to me, that the same people were saying "I do" more and more often - that is they were getting married, divorced, married, divorced, married ...
Posted by: michael farris at October 10, 2007 04:36 PM
The original reads: "Czyli gra szła nie o to, żeby wygrać, jak we wszystkich innych grach i co stanoiw każdej gry zasadę."
So you have both "wszystko" and "każdy" to be sure to be sure. What did Myśliwski have to say for himself on the radio that so put you off his book?
Posted by: Henry Grodsk at October 14, 2007 12:13 PM