Post by Bonobo on May 19, 2009 21:36:05 GMT 1
I have always liked this poet and his fables. They have been in Polish classes curriculum since times immemorial.
I talked about his works during my Polish language entrance exam to the English Department in 1980s (there were two exams). I did it with immense pleasure and passed with flying colours. Certain boy called Grzegorz Turnau, already a renown Krakow singer, poet and composer at the time, didn`t pass the Polish exam 2 times. Paradoxes!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_Krasicki
Ignacy Krasicki (Dubiecko, February 3, 1735 – March 14, 1801, Berlin), from 1766 Prince-Bishop of Warmia (in German, Ermland) and from 1795 Archbishop of Gniezno (thus, Primate of Poland), was Poland's leading Enlightenment poet ("the Prince of Poets"), Poland's La Fontaine, author of the first Polish novel, playwright, journalist, encyclopedist, and translator from French and Greek.
Krasicki's major works won European fame and were translated into Latin, French, German, Italian, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Slovene, Hungarian. The broad reception of his works was sustained throughout the 19th century.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_and_Parables
Fables and Parables (Bajki i przypowieści, 1779), by Ignacy Krasicki, is a noted work in a long international tradition of fable-writing that reaches back to antiquity.
Emulating the fables of the ancient Greek Aesop, the Macedonian-Roman Phaedrus, the Polish Biernat of Lublin, and the Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine, and anticipating Russia's Ivan Krylov, the Pole Krasicki populates his fables with anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature, in masterful epigrammatic expressions of a skeptical, ironic view of the world.[1]
That view is informed by Krasicki's observations of humanity and of national and international politics in his day, notably the predicament of the expiring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Just seven years earlier (1772), the Commonwealth had experienced the first of three partitions that would, by 1795, totally expunge the Commonwealth from the political map of Europe.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would fall victim to the aggression of three powerful neighbors much as, in Krasicki's fable of "The Lamb and the Wolves," the lamb falls victim to the two wolves. The First Partition had rendered Krasicki—an intimate of Poland's last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski—involuntarily a subject of that Partition's instigator, Prussia's King Frederick II ("the Great"). Krasicki would, unlike Frederick, survive to witness the final dismemberment of the Commonwealth.
Krasicki's parables (e.g., "Abuzei and Tair," "The Blind Man and the Lame," "Son and Father," "The Farmer," "Child and Father," "The Master and His Dog," "The King and the Scribes," and "The Drunkard") do not, by definition, employ the anthropomorphization that characterizes the fables; and his parables point elegant moral lessons drawn from more quotidian human life.
Krasicki's, writes Czesław Miłosz, "is a world where the strong win and the weak lose in a sort of immutable order... Reason is exalted as the human equivalent of animal strength: the [clever] survive, the stupid perish."[2]
The Fables and Parables are written as 13-syllable lines, in couplets that rhyme aa bb...
Critics generally prefer Krasicki's more concise Fables and Parables (1779), sampled here, over his later New Fables, published posthumously in 1802. This is consistent with Krasicki's own dictum in On Versification and Versifiers that "A fable should be brief, clear and, so far as possible, preserve the truth."[3]
In the same treatise, Krasicki explains that a fable "is a story commonly ascribed to animals, that people who read it might take instruction from [the animals'] example or speech...; it originated in eastern lands where supreme governance reposed in the hands of autocrats. Thus, when it was feared to proclaim the truth openly, simulacra were employed in fables so that—if only in this way—the truth might be agreeable alike to the ruled and to the rulers."[4]
Following are samples of Krasicki's Fables and Parables (1779) in English translation by Christopher Kasparek.
Foreword to the Fables
There was once a young man whose temperance never flagged;
There was an old man, too, who never scolded or nagged;
There was a rich man who shared his wealth with the needy;
There flourished an author, for renown never greedy;
There was a customs man who did not steal; a cobbler who shunned alcohol;
A soldier who did not boast; a rogue who did not brawl;
There was a politician who never thought of self;
There was a poet who never put lies on his shelf.
"No, you'll never convince me that that's the right label!"
"Nevertheless, I will call all of this a fable."
Abuzei and Tair
"Congratulate me, father," said Tair, "I prosper.
Tomorrow I am to become the Sultan's brother-
In-law and hunt with him." Quoth father: "All does alter,
Your lord's good graces, women's favor, autumn weather."
He had guessed aright, the son's plans did not turn out well:
The Sultan withheld his sister, all day the rain fell.
The Blind Man and the Lame
A blind man was carrying a lame man on his back,
And everything was going well, everything's on track,
When the blind man decides to take it into his head
That he needn't listen to all that the lame man said.
"This stick I have will guide the two of us safe," said he,
And though warned by the lame man, he plowed into a tree.
On they proceeded; the lame man now warned of a brook;
The two survived, but their possessions a soaking took.
At last the blind man ignored the warning of a drop,
And that was to turn out their final and fatal stop.
Which of the two travelers, you may ask, was to blame?
Why, 'twas both the heedless blind man and the trusting lame.
The Eagle and the Hawk
Eagle, not wishing to incommode himself with chase,
Decided to send hawk after sparrows in his place.
Hawk brought him the sparrows, eagle ate them with pleasure;
At last, not quite sated with the dainties to measure,
Feeling his appetite growing keener and keener —
Eagle ate fowl for breakfast, the fowler for dinner.
The Rat and the Cat
Sitting on the altar, "They're burning incense to me,"
Boasted the rat to all his assembled family.
As the rat grew giddy from excess of incense smoke,
A cat lunged in, seized him, and dispatched him at a stroke.
Ocean and River Tagus
Ocean, all too arrogant in his immensity,
Began scorning the rivers that flowed into his sea.
"Send no more water," he told them, "I've enough of it."
Said Tagus: "Only take thought — it is for your profit,
For your grandeur that we do cleave the globe's fertile land:
Were it not for us rivers, your sea were not so grand."
The Lump of Ice and the Crystal
Begotten of a muddy puddle, a lump of ice
Resented a crystal's transparence and in a trice
Started praying to the sun. The sun began to shine,
The lump of ice glistered but proceeded to decline;
Thus, keen to mend its lot with inopportune trouble,
The lump melted away and returned to the puddle.
The Old Dog and the Old Servant
So long as he brought in the duck and chased down the hare,
Old Sorrel could always reckon on getting his share.
Then the dog grew long in the tooth and could hunt no more,
So his lordship put the erstwhile pet out to pasture.
The poor dog, gnawing at bones, an object of pity,
Was fed by the once-seneschal, since become gillie.
Son and Father
Every age has its bitter, every age has its grief:
Son toiled o'er his book, father was vexed beyond belief.
The one had no rest; the other no freedom, forsooth:
Father lamented his age, son lamented his youth.
Birds in a Cage
"Why do you weep?" inquired the young siskin of the old,
"You're more comfortable in this cage than out in the cold."
"You were born caged," said the elder, "this was your morrow;
"I was free, now I'm caged—hence the cause of my sorrow."
I talked about his works during my Polish language entrance exam to the English Department in 1980s (there were two exams). I did it with immense pleasure and passed with flying colours. Certain boy called Grzegorz Turnau, already a renown Krakow singer, poet and composer at the time, didn`t pass the Polish exam 2 times. Paradoxes!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_Krasicki
Ignacy Krasicki (Dubiecko, February 3, 1735 – March 14, 1801, Berlin), from 1766 Prince-Bishop of Warmia (in German, Ermland) and from 1795 Archbishop of Gniezno (thus, Primate of Poland), was Poland's leading Enlightenment poet ("the Prince of Poets"), Poland's La Fontaine, author of the first Polish novel, playwright, journalist, encyclopedist, and translator from French and Greek.
Krasicki's major works won European fame and were translated into Latin, French, German, Italian, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Slovene, Hungarian. The broad reception of his works was sustained throughout the 19th century.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_and_Parables
Fables and Parables (Bajki i przypowieści, 1779), by Ignacy Krasicki, is a noted work in a long international tradition of fable-writing that reaches back to antiquity.
Emulating the fables of the ancient Greek Aesop, the Macedonian-Roman Phaedrus, the Polish Biernat of Lublin, and the Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine, and anticipating Russia's Ivan Krylov, the Pole Krasicki populates his fables with anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature, in masterful epigrammatic expressions of a skeptical, ironic view of the world.[1]
That view is informed by Krasicki's observations of humanity and of national and international politics in his day, notably the predicament of the expiring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Just seven years earlier (1772), the Commonwealth had experienced the first of three partitions that would, by 1795, totally expunge the Commonwealth from the political map of Europe.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would fall victim to the aggression of three powerful neighbors much as, in Krasicki's fable of "The Lamb and the Wolves," the lamb falls victim to the two wolves. The First Partition had rendered Krasicki—an intimate of Poland's last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski—involuntarily a subject of that Partition's instigator, Prussia's King Frederick II ("the Great"). Krasicki would, unlike Frederick, survive to witness the final dismemberment of the Commonwealth.
Krasicki's parables (e.g., "Abuzei and Tair," "The Blind Man and the Lame," "Son and Father," "The Farmer," "Child and Father," "The Master and His Dog," "The King and the Scribes," and "The Drunkard") do not, by definition, employ the anthropomorphization that characterizes the fables; and his parables point elegant moral lessons drawn from more quotidian human life.
Krasicki's, writes Czesław Miłosz, "is a world where the strong win and the weak lose in a sort of immutable order... Reason is exalted as the human equivalent of animal strength: the [clever] survive, the stupid perish."[2]
The Fables and Parables are written as 13-syllable lines, in couplets that rhyme aa bb...
Critics generally prefer Krasicki's more concise Fables and Parables (1779), sampled here, over his later New Fables, published posthumously in 1802. This is consistent with Krasicki's own dictum in On Versification and Versifiers that "A fable should be brief, clear and, so far as possible, preserve the truth."[3]
In the same treatise, Krasicki explains that a fable "is a story commonly ascribed to animals, that people who read it might take instruction from [the animals'] example or speech...; it originated in eastern lands where supreme governance reposed in the hands of autocrats. Thus, when it was feared to proclaim the truth openly, simulacra were employed in fables so that—if only in this way—the truth might be agreeable alike to the ruled and to the rulers."[4]
Following are samples of Krasicki's Fables and Parables (1779) in English translation by Christopher Kasparek.
Foreword to the Fables
There was once a young man whose temperance never flagged;
There was an old man, too, who never scolded or nagged;
There was a rich man who shared his wealth with the needy;
There flourished an author, for renown never greedy;
There was a customs man who did not steal; a cobbler who shunned alcohol;
A soldier who did not boast; a rogue who did not brawl;
There was a politician who never thought of self;
There was a poet who never put lies on his shelf.
"No, you'll never convince me that that's the right label!"
"Nevertheless, I will call all of this a fable."
Abuzei and Tair
"Congratulate me, father," said Tair, "I prosper.
Tomorrow I am to become the Sultan's brother-
In-law and hunt with him." Quoth father: "All does alter,
Your lord's good graces, women's favor, autumn weather."
He had guessed aright, the son's plans did not turn out well:
The Sultan withheld his sister, all day the rain fell.
The Blind Man and the Lame
A blind man was carrying a lame man on his back,
And everything was going well, everything's on track,
When the blind man decides to take it into his head
That he needn't listen to all that the lame man said.
"This stick I have will guide the two of us safe," said he,
And though warned by the lame man, he plowed into a tree.
On they proceeded; the lame man now warned of a brook;
The two survived, but their possessions a soaking took.
At last the blind man ignored the warning of a drop,
And that was to turn out their final and fatal stop.
Which of the two travelers, you may ask, was to blame?
Why, 'twas both the heedless blind man and the trusting lame.
The Eagle and the Hawk
Eagle, not wishing to incommode himself with chase,
Decided to send hawk after sparrows in his place.
Hawk brought him the sparrows, eagle ate them with pleasure;
At last, not quite sated with the dainties to measure,
Feeling his appetite growing keener and keener —
Eagle ate fowl for breakfast, the fowler for dinner.
The Rat and the Cat
Sitting on the altar, "They're burning incense to me,"
Boasted the rat to all his assembled family.
As the rat grew giddy from excess of incense smoke,
A cat lunged in, seized him, and dispatched him at a stroke.
Ocean and River Tagus
Ocean, all too arrogant in his immensity,
Began scorning the rivers that flowed into his sea.
"Send no more water," he told them, "I've enough of it."
Said Tagus: "Only take thought — it is for your profit,
For your grandeur that we do cleave the globe's fertile land:
Were it not for us rivers, your sea were not so grand."
The Lump of Ice and the Crystal
Begotten of a muddy puddle, a lump of ice
Resented a crystal's transparence and in a trice
Started praying to the sun. The sun began to shine,
The lump of ice glistered but proceeded to decline;
Thus, keen to mend its lot with inopportune trouble,
The lump melted away and returned to the puddle.
The Old Dog and the Old Servant
So long as he brought in the duck and chased down the hare,
Old Sorrel could always reckon on getting his share.
Then the dog grew long in the tooth and could hunt no more,
So his lordship put the erstwhile pet out to pasture.
The poor dog, gnawing at bones, an object of pity,
Was fed by the once-seneschal, since become gillie.
Son and Father
Every age has its bitter, every age has its grief:
Son toiled o'er his book, father was vexed beyond belief.
The one had no rest; the other no freedom, forsooth:
Father lamented his age, son lamented his youth.
Birds in a Cage
"Why do you weep?" inquired the young siskin of the old,
"You're more comfortable in this cage than out in the cold."
"You were born caged," said the elder, "this was your morrow;
"I was free, now I'm caged—hence the cause of my sorrow."
