Life / Embarrassing Polish parents/relatives stories [5]

Merged: Polish stories: Oh, that famous jump from Kasprowy

A funny story is being told on the blog "Blog narciarski Krzysztofa Brunetki". The original source is the book "Sklep potrzeb kulturalnych", Kroh, Antoni, 1999 edition [I guess].

Here is my (long) English summary:

A legend has it that during the WWII, one of the local skiers from Zakopane area, Józef Uznański, jumped out of the gondola of the cable railway at the vicinity of the upper station at Kasprowy Mountain, with the skies on, and successfully ran down the rocky gully downhill, escaping SS bullets. Some local guides still tell this story to tourists, hailing him as a heroic Home Army courier.

Upper station of Kasprowy cable railway

Old gondola of the Kasprowy cable railway

In fact the story is not quite correct. During WWII Józek was quite a handsome boy and also an excellent skier. If it was not for the war he would probably become an Olympian. Girls were after him all the time. One of those was a daughter of a kindly Tyrollean, a German border guard, stationed near the Kasprowy's upper station. He has learned about the love affair of Józek and his daughter and they had a man-to-man talk. Papa adviced cooling down until the war is over - pointing out all sort of dangers facing all of them if Gestapo learned about it.

Well, since the two lovers continued meeting secretly, the papa decided to teach Józek a lesson and set a trap at the upper station, pretending to be away on some assignment. He and his two buddies simply decided to beat Józek up. When Józek saw them waiting for him at the upper station he did what was described before: he jumped down and run down the gully. No, nobody was shooting at him. German papa was not that angry.

Józef Uznański, a legendary skier and TOPR rescuer
(TOPR - Tatra Volunteer Search and Rescue)

After the war Józek was still an excellent skier and even a better rescuer. Nobody denies that, but he has never been a Home Army courier.

But one day a French delegation of rescuers visited Zakopane and Józek was one of their hosts. They must have had few drinks and the French - being French - bragged about general and specific French superiority. Józek got angry and told them his story with all the embellishments he could think about: SS, bullets flying, couriering for Home Army and all of this. The French were really impressed, took plenty of photos, and then - after a big article with pictures of Józek appeared in some French magazine - some organization of Maquis veterans decided to pin some medal on him. And when the Polish newspapers learned about it, they started another avalanche of stories. What initially looked like an innocent bragging now became a real embarrassment. It was too late to admit the bragging. And this way Józek has become a national hero - with another medal for bravery (Polish this time) and interviews abound.

In the sixties a movie was being shot on site about Józek and since nobody was willing to repeat what Józek originally did a stuntman was given an easier task: jump down from the gondola near the lower station and slide down of the branches of a mighty spruce. This worked fine first time, but during the second shot the stuntman missed the spruce and landed in hospital. Till this day the passengers of the cable railway look for two places: one where the stuntman jumped, and the other where Józek jumped.

Locals in Zakopane knew the real story and Józek was quite sensitive about all of this. Many years ago, Antoni Kroh - the author of the book describing the events, a historian, became a volunteer rescuer in Tatra Search and Rescue Mission, Zakopane. As everywhere in the world, newcomers are usually tested and often become anti-heroes of practical jokes, such as snipe hunt, wild-goose chase or fool's errand. [A famous bucket of prop wash comes to mind]. Somebody pointed Józek to Antoni, described to him his heroic WWII deed and suggested that this would be a good material for some historical scientific paper. Antoni jumped into such opportunity, run after Józek, presented himself and asked for interview. Józek looked him up and down, thought a little bit, inhaled some air and then proposed: "A w mordę chcesz?" [Would you like to get punched in the face?]

[The Google translator just made me laugh: "In the face you want?".]

Language / Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue? [39]


I hope you are not irked by anything I wrote. At the risk of repeating myself: I really appreciate good work translators generally do, especially in literature, and particularly in poetry. I am just asking questions, as is clearly shown in the title of the thread. It fascinates me to see what kind of obstacles a translator must face and what methods are used to overcome them.

The little poem I quoted was just one example, where the formal structure does not fit well into some languages. Imagine translating it to Italian: one must forget about the original three syllable rhythm - four syllables are more likely.

Japanese haiku, with its 5-7-5 syllable structure, does not map well into the "stress-timed" English. Here is a quote from "Haiku, An Anthology of Japanese Poems" by Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto and Akira Yamamoto:

Take for example, the most famous of all haiku, a verse by Basho (1644-94):

Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

Furu means "old", ike means "pond or ponds", and ya is an exclamatory particle, something like "ah". Kawazu is a "frog or frogs'; tobikomu "jump in"; mizu, 'water; no, the genetive "of"; and oto, "sound or sounds (Japanese does not usually distinguish singular from plural). If using the singular, a literal translation would be:

Old pond--
a frog jumps in
the sound of water

Only the third of these lines matches the 5-7-5 formula, and the other lines would require "padding" to fit the usual definition:

[There is an] old pond--
[suddenly] a frog jumps in
the sound of water

That does not mean that one cannot write good haiku verses in English or in other languages. The only thing is - they will not be strictly the Japanese-like haiku.

Language / Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue? [39]


Intriguing, you actually loved it? Nice! I did not read it but I know more or less what it is all about. Bach and Escher taken for granted, but Gödel is not on everybody's top ten list.

Language / Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue? [39]


Well, I am just a poor peasant, but I am fascinated by work of masters.

But I can easily guess that there is a fluid border between the original source and the translation output. How far you, as a translator, are allowed to interfere with the original structure of a poem? Is a form as important as a content? And what do we call the content? Surely it's not just a story! There is something over and above over there.

I can imagine that in some cases the outcome is so different from the source that the two might be completely unrecognizable as "a couple". So in effect the translator has transformed the original text into something else - becoming in a way a co-author of the poem. Is it fair? Some say yes, some say no.

Some literary products are strictly about the form, like - for example - creation of many volumes of text, subjected to some formal rules. Volume 1, all vowels are just "a", volume 2 - we are using only e's, etc. Is this literature? Sure it is. We may not like it, but we do not have the power to categorize it is "non-literature".

Let me describe one little item. There is a book:
Le Ton beau de Marot, In Praise of the Music of Language, by Douglas R, Hofstadter.

It has more than 600 pages of incessant talking on hundreds of subjects. but it circles around one major topic: translation of one very short poem by an obscure 16-th century French poet "Clément Marot".

Here it goes

A une Damoyselle malade

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C'est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu'on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couler fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L'embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

This poem has the following properties:
1. The poem is 28 lines long
2. Each line consists of three syllables
3. Each line main stress falls on final syllable
4. The poem is a string of rhythmic couples: AA BB CC ...
5. Midway, the tone changes from formal "vous" to informal "tu"
6. The poems opening line is echoed precisely at the very bottom.
7. The poet puts his own name directly into his poem.

TRANSLATE.
This was the challenge issued by Hofstadter to many people around the world. And guess what? All had major problems. English-specific, Polish-specific, Italian-specific...

Language / Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue? [39]


But this seems to be something else. He apparently was capable of doing the translation, but he did not want to do it. Maybe his uncle's messianic philosophy did not fit his view of the world? Just guessing.

Language / Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue? [39]


Yes, that's what she (Marit MacArthur) said as well.

Language / It's just semantics! - in Polish or otherwise [15]


I am not going to debate this, because those two statements represent tautology.:-)

Now, this could be a good reason to start some heated debate unless I have first explained to you that I meant the "tautology" as the "universally unconditional truth", not as something with a negative connotation, such as in "you are repeating yourself, sir". So I still claim that semantics matters very much in real life, not just in programming.

Oh, and I agree that some foreign concepts has been adopted to Polish with wrong semantics. I wonder why? My classic is "awantura".

Language / It's just semantics! - in Polish or otherwise [15]


I liked your layered explanation but did you really mean the part I (mis)quoted? :-)

I like Ziemowit's ".. cokolwiek by to miało znaczyć". It is not dismissive and opens the door to possible future clarification of details. On the other hand, a carbon copy translation of the phrase in question: "kwestia semantyki czy czysta semantyka" sounds to me unnatural, quite pompous actually, in Polish.

Semantic web? That was a good one, alexw68!, I am sure many semantic web scientists or designers must hear that phrase quite often, as a joke.

But playing a devil's advocate for a while… I am often tempted to say, "It's all about semantics!", or "It's just syntax!" instead of "It's just semantics!".

When I design a piece of software I am very deeply concerned about its meaning. I have to decide what is its purpose, what it should deliver and what is its interface to a user. The rest is superficial. Once I decided on the meaning of the procedure I have designed I can then take one of the gazillion programming languages - all having different syntax - and implement the idea. Of course, the beauty of the program is mostly based on the syntax of a programming language one uses (so called programming language wars are mostly about syntax), but the usefulness of the program is in its semantics.

USA, Canada / Opening a small shop, and selling many Polish items in USA. Do you think this would work? [32]



What chocolate? Two days ago I was given a little gift ("I shopped specifically for you for some good Polish chocolate, since I thought you might have missed it"). Now, that was some bad Wedel's product. Made of some nuts and raisins stuff, embedded in some ridiculously overly sweet mumbo jumbo. Who owns Wedel now? Cadbury? The worst stuff I ever tasted - and I had to smile all the time and be thankful. To be truthful, if I were doing the shopping myself I would have never touched anything looking so bad. I hope you can still buy a black bitter chocolate from Wedel and other places, and also the traditional Wedel's cake. But to be frank, I have not been into any Polish shop here for the last four months, so what do I know. Being too busy ...

Honey used to be quite a good and popular item in Toronto's shops. I have not seen any honey from Poland for the last two years or so. This has something to do with that terrible viral bee disease, which kills many, many bee swarms all over the world. Now they sell here mostly the stuff from Australia (being the primary suspect to actually proliferate this disease) and from New Zealand. The last good buckwheat's honey (strong, for people with an acquired taste) I bought here was from Ukraine, one year ago. Gone ...

On the positive side - mushrooms might be a good business for you. Over here, the Porcinis (Boletus Edulis), the Italian competition to Polish "Borowik", are sold in little packets - and they cost a lot. Polish shops still sell them, as they used to do it for years and years.

I have seen all sorts of marinated mushrooms coming from all over Poland - ranging from cheap low quality stuff, as well as the expensive chanterelles (kurki). One major reason that this is still a good concept is this: (and I do not know about the American side of the Great Lakes) On the Canadian side there used to be a very destructive clear-cut lumber-jack industry. Evidently, what we see around here, tree-wise, is no older than 80 years old or so. The point is, when the ecosystem is destroyed the mushrooms suffer as well, and they need a LOT OF TIME to come back again.

As an anecdotical evidence I should add that in my former 7-acre property in Northern Muskoka all I could find on my wooded property was a little patch of "kurki" - 1x3 meters. That's it! Ok, some occasional porcini, but nothing to call home about.

In conclusion, the mushroom business in USA seems a good idea to me for few reasons: non-availability, modern cuisine (French cooks on both sides of the Great Lakes).