A thoughtful collection of tales from Stanislaw Lem – up @shinynewbooks today! :D

I’ve been dipping my toes back into sci fi recently (of the classic, translated kind) with another lovely reissue from Penguin in their Modern Classics range of a book by Stanislaw Lem. He’s an author I’ve read a lot of in recent years, and I’ve written about his work both here and on Shiny New Books.

His “Tales of Pirx the Pilot” is an interesting work which almost acts as a bridge between his collections of shorter, funnier works and more serious books like “Solaris”. It’s a thought-provoking look at questing human beings voyaging out through the stars, and I loved it! You can read my full review here!

Here comes 2020! (well, almost…)

I can hardly believe it’s 2020, but there you go – it is, so Happy New Year to all readers of the Ramblings! Traditionally, I should be announcing all sorts of shiny reading plans and challenges for the new year (and new decade) but I haven’t got my head around that yet, to be frank. I have my eyes on a couple of low-stress projects involving translated literature, and of course there will be our Club week reads. So I shall ponder on plans for the next few days and a post will follow…

Meantime, just for fun, here’s an image of the books I read in December. I’ve got into the habit of taking a snap of each month’s reading, inspired by Andy Miller’s pictures on Twitter; however, December’s reading was a bit thin, thanks to me being screamingly busy at work and home. Never mind – a new month, a new year, a new decade and so hopefully more impetus for reading! 😀 As you can tell, I’m a bit behind on my reviewing and several of these will be covered in January. The Lem is for Shiny New Books, and was a great joy!

As for what my first read of 2020 will be? Well, it’s this:

That birthday book token is coming in very useful, because this *didn’t* arrive from Santa and I wanted it so much, so it was purchased straight after Christmas (ahem…) I love James’ writing and I love Larkin, so I’m hoping it will be the perfect read for me. What books are you starting 2020 with???

#1965Club – looking back at some previous reads…

During our Club reading weeks, I always like to do a post looking back at books from the particular year which I’ve read in the past; in some cases, there will be reviews here on the Ramblings, and in others they’ll be pre-blog reads. Either way, I always find it interesting to revisit previous books, and there were quite a number from 1965! First up, let’s look at the older ones.

Pre-blog reading

The pre-blog pile has a bit of a variety! There is, of course, “I had trouble in getting to Solla Sollew” by Dr. Seuss; it’s one of the pivotal books in my life and I’ve written about it before. When I borrowed it from the library in my childhood it obvs hadn’t been around for long! Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” is a no-brainer; I’ve had my original paperback since my teens, and I can never read enough of her work.  “Roseanna” by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is a more recent arrival; Mr. Kaggsy bought me the whole sequence of Martin Beck crime novels (of which this is the first) many years ago and I love them to bits – my favourite Scandi crime books. Jack Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels” is also a book I’ve owned since my teens and I probably would be less tolerant of him and it nowadays; I would have liked to re-read had time permitted this week, but somehow I don’t think that will happen… And finally, the majestic “Black Rain” by Masuji Ibuse, a book I read when I first began to read Japanese literature. It’s powerful and unforgettable and I can’t recommend it enough.

There are no doubt many more pre-blog reads from 1965 (it was a bumper year!) but those were the obvious ones I could lay hands on. So let’s move on to 1965 books I’ve previously covered on the blog!

1965 Books on the Blog!

Let’s start with a couple of favourite authors. And in fact Italo Calvino has been a favourite since I was in my 20s; the rather battered copy of “Cosmicomics” on top of the pile is from that era. I revisited the book with “The Complete Cosmicomics” and was even more knocked out than the first time. I love his books. End of.

Stanislaw Lem is a more recent discovery, but his quirky and clever and thought-provoking sci-fi stories have been a fast favourite at the Ramblings. “The Cyberiad” came out in 1965 but my lovely Penguin Modern Classic is more recent. Definitely an author I’d recommend.

Here’s another pair of very individual authors… Nabokov needs no introduction and his book “The Eye” is a short, fascinating and tricksy book with a very unreliable narrator. Georges Perec‘s “Things” is another unusual one – from the amount of Perec on this blog, you know that I love his work, and this particular title, exploring ennui in the budding consumer society of the 1960s, was very intriguing.

It wouldn’t be the Ramblings without some Russian authors, would it? Here’s another of my favourite authors, Mikhail Bulgakov. “Black Snow” and “A Theatrical Novel” are translations of the same book, one of the author’s shorter and more manic works. If I had time, I’d start a project of re-reading his works in order.

And “An Armenian Sketchbook” by Vasily Grossman proved to me a. just how bad my memory is and b. that it’s a good thing I have this blog… I was all set to read this book as one of my 1965 choices, when there was a little niggle in my head. I checked, and I’d read and reviewed it back in 2013….  *sigh*

Finally, something a little lighter – or is it??

I’m a recent convert to Tove Jansson and the Moomins, but really this book should be subtitled “Moominpappa’s mid-life crisis“! The titular father has a bit of a panic at feeling useless and so drags the whole family off to sea. There’s an awful lot of stuff going on below the surface here…

So… that’s just a few of my previous reads from 1965. I’m sure there would be tons more if I looked harder, but I’m going to concentrate on new reads for the rest of the week. And while I do that, next up on the blog will be a guest post from Mr. Kaggsy! 😀

“A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.” #stanislawlem

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
Translated by Michael Kandel

Regular readers of the Ramblings will be aware of my love of the writing of Stanislaw Lem; I’ve reviewed several of the lovely reissues of his books in beautiful Penguin Modern Classics editions, either here or on Shiny New Books. So when I happened upon this lovely copy of “The Futurological Congress” in Foyles early this month, it would have been rude not to pick it up, wouldn’t it??

Lem is a fascinating author, writing in the sci-fi genre but with a considerable amount of provoking stuff bubbling under the surface. Most of the books of his I’ve read have been set in space, often with his character Ijon Tichy whizzing around from planet to planet, encountering odd civilizations; or else there are stories of robot worlds that seem somehow oddly human and familiar. However, “Futurological…”, although a story once again featuring Tichy, was a very long and strange trip indeed…

Tichy is attending the Futurological Congress, which is being held in Costa Rica; the time period is unspecified, but seems in many ways contemporary with the book’s publication date of 1971. However, this is a very unstable regime and location; there is political unrest, demonstrations, kidnappings, riots – in fact, an exaggeration of how the world actually was in that era. Tichy is ever resourceful and manages to avoid most of the trouble to start with, hiding out in a massive 100-storey Hilton Hotel. However, throughout the book there is a constant thread of drug use, and by that I mean drugs used to control; hallucinogens, pacifiers, drugs to cause anger, drugs to cause love – again, a reflection perhaps of the 1960s which were coming to a nasty end, but rather unusual, at least in the Lem books I’ve read. Nevertheless, despite being written in an era long gone, there was much that was familiar (alas) in this day and age…

I immediately assumed that this was either a madman or a professional terrorist-fanatic (we have no lack of them these days), but again I was mistaken.

As things explode (literally!) Tichy ends up in the sewers under the city, hiding alongside Professor Trottelreiner and subject to continual hallucinations which are only countered by throwing himself into the sewer (yuk!) Things get weirder and weirder until eventually he’s shot, rescued, transplanted into another body, frozen, and thawed out in a very unpleasant future. But how many of Tichy’s experiences can he (or we?) accept as real?

Who’d ever have guessed, in my day, digital machines, reaching a certain level of intelligence, would become unreliable, deceitful, that with wisdom they would also acquire cunning?

I guess I approached “Futurological..” expecting something a little oddball (bearing in mind my previous readings of Lem’s work) – but perhaps something not quite this wacky… It’s a roller-coaster of a read, with Tichy careering from one crisis to another, or one hallucination to another, and it’s entertaining and disconcerting to read because you’re never quite sure quite what is real or unreal, whether the things he thinks are happening really are, and how he’ll get out of the situation he’s in, or perceives himself to be in! You could perhaps argue that he’s the ultimate unreliable narrator!

I was amazed to find articles full of saccharine platitudes on the theme of the bonds of love as the surest guarantee of universal peace – right beside articles that were full of dire threats, articles promising bloody repression or else an equally bloody insurrection. The only explanation I can think of for this peculiar incongruity was that some of the journalists had been drinking the water that day, and some hadn’t.

Nevertheless, the book does of course have an underlying seriousness. It generates deep questions on the nature of reality and perception, on how much we can really trust our subjective view of the world and perhaps reflects concerns of the times about how drugs could be used to manipulate the general population. Tichy has a handle on what’s happening to him some of the time, but at others is completely convinced by the illusion and that’s very unsettling for both him and the reader.

Once again, the book has been translated by Michael Kandel and his handling of what must have been complex decisions about how to render Lem’s wordplay seem remarkable and effective. The section of the book where Tichy is in the future are particularly fascinating, as in that future much control is dependent on the manipulation of language. This is not a new concept – Orwell, for example, had this as a vital element in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” – but Kandel produces some wonderful linguistics which showcase just how essential it is that we understand and can express ourselves with words. The importance of language and communication can’t be overstated as we see time and again in dystopian fiction – and this *is* certainly a dystopian world.

However, although Lem is making serious points, he’s always a funny writer. I’m assuming from Kandel’s humorous and clever wordplay that Lem is just as witty in the original language.

A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with the deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy. Why anyone would want that is another matter and quite beyond me.

There’s a dry, sardonic humour at play here, and the hapless Tichy and his companions do go through some hilarious and entertaining adventures. The sub-text that I always find in Lem’s writing was less obvious; I didn’t so much see parallels with the repressive regime of the East, but more a commentary on the world in general and a projection forward of where humanity could end up if we don’t take care of our planet and our civilisation. So – a stimulating, intriguing, weird and a little wacky read; brilliantly clever language and translation; and a lot of food for thought. I never seem to go wrong with reading Lem!

An amble around London – plus, of course, books…! @Foyles @PersephoneBooks @Glagoslav

I often like to pop up to London near Christmas for a bit of shopping and browsing, so when the lovely Ali from HeavenAli suggested a meet up and a trip to the Persephone Shop, how could I resist? We settled on 1st December as that avoided hideous engineering work issues on the train for me (I’m still recovering from September’s issues) and another lovely friend, Claire from the LibraryThing Virago group, joined us too.

I do enjoy a train journey with a coffee and a book!

I got up to London ridiculously early thanks to having to get a train at silly o’clock to get a cheap fare. So it would have been rude not to pop over to the kikki.k shop in Covent Garden and indulge in a little sale stationery – I do love stationery, and their ridiculously cheap traveller’s notebook refills will fit beautifully in my Webster’s Pages organiser! 😁

Before meeting the others I popped into Any Amount of Books and Henry Pordes on the Charing Cross Road (they seem to be the last bastions of second-hand bookselling there) and might have come away with these…

The Flora Tristan Virago was essential as I have her London Journals but not this one; and the Leopardi intrigued me, although I know little about him.

And then it was onwards to Foyles and meeting up with the lovely ladies! There was a lot of browsing and temptation, but in the end I came away with only three slim volumes (one of which I cannot show here as it’s a Christmas gift!) The Lem was irresistible as was the small poetry collection – I have no willpower…

We lunched in a nearby Nero (which catered for all our dietary needs including my vegan requirements!) and here I developed a bag crisis, when the zip on my new backpack completely died. Memo to self – never trust a Primark backpack… 😡 Fortunately, I had the trusty KBR tote with me, but it’s not so huge, and although I had a paper kikki.k bag I didn’t trust it to last the day out. So it was back to Foyles to follow Ali’s example and purchase one of their lovely and very sturdy tote bags – as you can see it’s substantial and attractive so was the perfect solution!

After the bag drama, we headed off to the Persephone shop (with a dangerous detour to the Bloomsbury Oxfam – I escaped unscathed, although Ali and Claire didn’t!) The Persephone Shop is, of course, always a delight and Lambs Conduit Street looked lovely and festive as we arrived. Ali and Claire had both come with lists; I was being restrained however as I’d put the Persephones I want on Christmas lists, so I didn’t dare buy any books there (which was very difficult!) So I restricted myself to an art card and some endpapers from the books to use in crafty ways!

After shopping, we repaired to a local cafe for coffees and cakes (vegan) and a good old book gossip, which was just lovely, before wending our various ways home.

Very weird-looking vegan pastry that actually tasted yummy!

So a lovely day out in the Big Smoke, with a little shopping, bookishness and good company – the perfect start to December, and thanks for your company, ladies! 😁

*****

Inevitably, however, there have been other bookish arrivals this week….

First up, a couple of images I shared on social media of some absolutely lovely volumes received from Glagoslav, an independent publisher specialising in Russian and Eastern European translated literature – so kind of the perfect publisher for me! I was so happy they reached out to me, and I can’t wait to get reading some of these books!

Additionally, I bagged this one from an online auction site because it sounded absolutely fascinating. I read about it on a page of recommendations on an AHRC site, of all places, and as I come from the North-East originally it was very appealing. It’s actually calling to me from the TBR right now.

And finally, this little lovely arrived as an unexpected treat from Annabel (she’s also one of the editors of the wonderful Shiny New Books). I love to share books around myself, and it’s such a nice treat to also be on the receiving end!

So – more books trickling into the house, but I *have* been getting rid of some! I sent four off to Liz this week, took two up to Ali and will be posting one off to Claire. Plus there’s a big box of donations building up in the hall. Is the ratio going in the right direction? Maybe….  But I still have an awful lot of books that are unread! 😀

Penguin Moderns 9 and 10 – Parables and poetry

Well – time for another slightly odd pairing… Sci fi fables written under a Communist regime and Irish poetry really *don’t* have much in common – apart from the fact that I enjoyed both, I suppose!

Penguin Modern 9 – The Three Electro-Knights by Stanislaw Lem

Polish author Stanislaw Lem is someone whose books I’ve read and loved before (as a quick search on the blog will show!) And in fact I’ve read all of the four stories featured in PM9, as they come from the collection Mortal Engines which I read and reviewed for Shiny New Books back in 2016. At the time, I commented on the collection had been put together by translator Michael Kandel to showcase Lem’s stories of robots, and the four tales featured here certainly do that.

Stanisław Lem in 1966, courtesy of his secretary, Wojciech Zemek.

What’s intriguing about Lem’s robot tales is how they take human emotions and events, then twist them with the robotic perspective. The stories are the title one,The White Death, King Globares and the Sages, and The Tale of King Gnuff. All could be tales of derring-do with knights in armour, but they’re robots on far-flung planets and worlds – just goes to show that not much changes the universe over…

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it. What do we really know about the origin of the Universe? A blank so wide can be filled with myths and legends. I wished, in my mythologizing, to reach the limits of improbability, and I believe that I came close. You know this already, therefore what you really wanted to ask was if the Universe is indeed ludicrous. But that question each much answer for himself.

Underlying these witty and entertaining tales is of course a serious point; for example, The White Death could be an allegory of any kind of colonial invasion humans have undertaken. And King Globares… parodies the trope of a king wanting to be entertained by his wise men which turns up in no end of ancient literature. King Gnuff is a little more surreal, with the monarch mutating into his actual realm and losing grip of reality as he sinks deeper into layer upon layer of dreams.

As I said in my original review, the stories present a chance to explore “the possibility of relations between humans and robots that speaks about our ability to reconcile ourselves to living in the world alongside other species and races, and learning to get along with them.” Lem was a great writer, and this Penguin Modern is an excellent introduction to his witty, clever, almost Steampunk stories.

Penguin Modern 10 – The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh

Book 10 is the second poetic entry into the list of Penguin Moderns, an a poet new to me! Irish author Kavanagh wrote both verse and novel, and is recognised for his realistic portrayal of Irish rural life. This selection is drawn from his Collected Poems, and spans his life’s work.

Joseph Mischyshyn / Dublin – Grand Canal – Poet Patrick Kavanagh

It’s obvious from the poems featured here that Kavanagh was very much rooted in his landscape. The poems are powerful and lyrical, and central to the book is his long work The Great Hunger, from which the collection takes its title. It’s a gritty and realistic work, taking a long hard look at the truth of life in rural communities against the background of famine, and is moving and memorable.

I do not know what age I am,
I am not mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

(from Innocence)

The rest of the poems are equally striking – often full of beautiful imagery, they have a streak of harshness and a refusal to lapse into saccharine descriptions of nature. In many ways, Kavanagh reminds me of that other great poet of the country, R.S. Thomas, and I can imagine them stalking their relative landscapes, glaring at the sky and composing as they went.

So an introduction into a new and excellent poet who I probably wouldn’t have read without the Penguin Modern box set – and whose work I’m now keen to read more of!

*****

Strangely, I now find myself one fifth (or 20%…) of the way through the Penguin Moderns box set, having created a series of posts on the books – something I was a bit reluctant to start as I don’t do well with challenges or commitments. But I’m enjoying this whole reading process so much, I think I might just carry on…. 🙂

#1977club – some previous reads

Well, we’re halfway through our week of reading from 1977, and I thought I would take a look at some previous reads – both on the blog and off. Interestingly, I don’t seem to have covered many books from 1977 here on the Ramblings, but I don’t record the publication dates so I may have missed some. Anyways, as they say, here are a few I’ve written about before:

Interestingly, I guess you could possibly say that these are what might be called ‘difficult’ books; Clarice Lispector, who I wrote about here, definitely has a reputation as not being a straightforward read. The Strugatskys wrote some marvellous speculative and sci-fi books – this one is a wonderfully twisty tale and you can read my thoughts on it here. And the Lem was one of a series of re-issues by Penguin. Again writing under a Soviet regime, so lots of subtexts, I covered it for Shiny New Books here.

However, in pre-blog times I’ve read some substantial books from 1977, including these:

I went through a phase of reading Diana Wynne Jones in the 1980s (and was lucky enough to meet her once). She was a marvellous author (much better than a certain HP writer, in my view…) and this is one of her Chrestomanci books. She always twisted reality rather wonderfully. The Tolkien came out not long after I had discovered The Lord of the Rings , and I was keen to read anything by the author; although I’ve never found anything that matched up to the trilogy.

The very fat Agatha book was essential reading for any fan of the great Christie and I read it back in the day although if you asked me for specifics I would collapse in a heap of poor memory. As for the Woolf diaries – well, I came upon these in the early 1980s (which is when I think they first appeared in paperback). I had a daily train commute at the time and I immersed myself in Woolf’s diaries and letters and all the wonder and strangeness of Bloomsbury – developed a real obsession with the group, in fact. I would love to read them all again – maybe in retirement – but time isn’t going to permit that during this week.

I also recall that I once owned and read a copy of “In Patagonia” and I think I rather enjoyed it – but it, and my memories of it, have I’m afraid flown off in the wind…

So – some previous reads on and off the blog. I’m still planning a mix of new and old reads this week, and it’s actually nice that our club reads give me what I feel is an excuse to re-read. What are you enjoying from 1977 this week?

More wonderful fiction from Lem – at Shiny New Books!

No doubt you’ll all have been exploring the lovely new revamped Shiny New Books with its wonderful array of reviews and recommendations! I have a few reviews coming up on the site, and one is published today – my thoughts on the latest reissued Stanislaw Lem book from Penguin, “Mortal Engines”.

Like the other Lem books I’ve read from Penguin, this one contains a collection of shorter works. However, in this volume they’re selected by translator Michael Kandel, and they’re an intriguing bunch with some longer stories moving away from the kind I’ve read so far.

My review of this fabulous collection is here – do go and have a look! 🙂

In Search of New Worlds

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

I’ve had “Solaris” sitting on my TBR for some time now, and despite loving the Lem I’ve read, for some reason I’ve held back from picking this one up. I’m not sure if it’s the film tie-in cover that’s put me off, or what, but as I’d hit one of those phases where I wasn’t sure what to read next, I decided this would be the time for “Solaris”.

Film tie in paperback

I had imagined that this would be a more serious type of science fiction than the slightly lighter collections of his I’d read, and indeed it is. The book is narrated in the first person by Kris Kelvin, a psychologist. The story begins with Kelvin travelling to Solaris where there is a space station studying the planet. However, on his arrival things are not as they should be; the station seems almost deserted, there is nobody there to meet him and if it wasn’t for the remote-controlled systems helping with his entry from space he might not have made it. There should have been three men on Solaris, as well as a number of robots, but the latter are entirely missing and Kelvin’s first encounter with one of the crew (Snow/Snaut) is problematic; the man is edgy, unnerved and unwilling to have much contact with Kelvin. It is revealed that the captain, Gibarian has committed suicide; and Sartorius, the other crew member, is locked away elsewhere in the station.

Solaris itself is a mystery; there have been enormous amounts of research, books, theses, investigations and experiments, none of which have revealed its real nature. It is made up of what appears initially as a kind of sea, but it eventually has become clear that this is a living entity of some kind, although no way has been found to contact it in any kind of meaningful way. The living ocean creates fantastic structures and destroys them; exhibits no hostility but can destroy if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time; and all the humans can do is observe.

However, it transpires that shortly before Kelvin arrived, the crew had tried an unauthorised experiment by bombarding the ocean with high-energy x-rays. The results were unexpected; each crew member has received a ‘visitor’ apparently created by the living ocean from somewhere deep down in their psyche. Gibarian’s was a “giant Negress”; we never find out who or what visited Snaut/Snow or Sartorius; and Kelvin soon encounters a perfect replica of a dead woman, Harey/Rheya, whose suicide he regards as his fault.

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

The replica is perfect, but needs to be close to the subject who created it; and Kelvin is torn between a wish to believe that this is the really Harey/Rheya, and the knowledge that it isn’t. While he grapples with the guilt tormenting him, the other two crew members struggle with their demons, and Sartorius attempts to find some way to destroy the visitors. Kelvin is face with a dilemma; if he leaves Solaris, then Harey/Rheya will die, but to stay means madness…

Ebook cover

As soon as I put aside the silly film images on the cover, “Solaris” was a winner on so many levels. The book excels in capturing the creeping menace of dealing with something completely unknown and the atmosphere of the space station is conjured brilliantly. As Lem so clearly identifies, when men reach into space they’re looking for something human-like – more advanced than us, yes, but similar. In all of his fictions I’ve read so far, contact is often a fumbling, difficult affair (in Star Diaries an ambassador was mistaken for a soft drinks vending machine!) but here it seems impossible. The entity on Solaris is something completely incomprehensible to the human mind and this is a more likely scenario for finding life in the stars than some bug-eyed alien from a 1950s trashy movie.

A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all.

Not only does Lem suggest that it’s pointless for us to look to space for contact, he also suggests that we don’t really know what we are yet ourselves and until we do we would do best to avoid alien cultures.

“Solaris” is a wonderful and thought-provoking book, though it isn’t perfect; the narrative is a little uneven, and there are long sections looking at the history of Solaristic studies which perhaps don’t sit quite comfortably into the story. However, putting this aside, it has to be one of the most interesting and provocative science fiction books I’ve read. The concept is brilliant; the idea that there are creations we can’t even begin to understand is a novel one for the time the book was written; and the tale itself is gripping and spooky. The science lost me occasionally, but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the plot. And the descriptions of the ocean’s creations were so vivid that the images they painted in my head will stay for a long time.

I’m now very glad that I haven’t seem either of the “Solaris” films, because I imagine that particularly the US version would have focused very much on the story of Kelvin and Harey/Rheya at the expense of the philosophical ideas behind the book. As it is, I’m even more convinced of Stanislaw Lem’s greatness and I really can’t wait to read more of his work.

******

You might well have wondered why I gave alternative names to some of the characters above, and I think an extra paragraph or two needs to be spent explaining the translation issues I had with “Solaris”. The version I had (tree book) was the Faber film tie in version translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steven Cox. However, I had also picked up an e-book version and when I had a chance to read a few pages on the electronic device, I did so, but noticed that this was a different version, by Bill Johnston. A little online research led to me finding out that the Faber version was a translation of a French version of the Polish original, which Lem had described as poor (the French version, that is). The Johnston version, direct from the Polish to (American) English, was described as “careful and accurate”.

Some of the differences were obvious – the names, for example; in Polish, the woman’s name is Harey, but this was changed to Rheya for no apparent reason, and the same with Snaut/Snow. As for the other differences, I can’t say as I haven’t made a comparison, but I did end up switching from the paper book to the e-book halfway through as my confidence in the Kilmartin/Cox version had been shaken.

And yet – that’s not the full story, as just because a translation is “careful and accurate” doesn’t mean it’s going to read best… When I was preparing this review, I compared the two versions of a particular passage I wanted to quote and here they are:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. (Kilmartin/Cox)

We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. (Johnston)

There are quite a few differences here, and I have to say that if I was ignoring the background issues to the translation, I would certainly prefer the Kilmartin/Cox. Whether that’s a US English vs proper English thing, I don’t know – but it certainly muddies the waters of appreciating “Solaris” a lot!

Where no man has gone before

The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem

Early last year I had the pleasure of reading my first book by Stanislaw Lem – The Cyberiad – and it was a wonderful experience. I found his mixture of slightly spoofy, satirical sci very appealing and clever, and so when I noticed that Penguin Modern Classics had brought out another of his books, “The Star Diaries” I was awfully tempted. I resisted for a while, settling for recommending that the Offspring bought a copy as a birthday gift for a sci-fi loving friend. But I kept coming across the book and finally succumbed in Norwich recently!

Lem is probably best known for Solaris (and I do have a copy of that book sitting on my shelves); this book, however, features a space traveller called Ijon Tichy who apparently appears in several of Lem’s books. “The Star Diaries” collects together several accounts of his journeys through the stars and once again, in stories a little reminiscent of The Cyberiad, we’re met with a wonderful mixture of humour, satire and deeper meanings.

… every great idea must be backed by force, as one can see in numerous examples from history, which illustrate that the best argument in defense of a theory is the police.

There are twelve Voyages in all, starting with the Seventh, ending with the Twenty-eighth and losing several in between. Tichy has all sorts of strange encounters, including a couple that involve severe temporal confusion – in fact, the Seventh Voyage has multiple versions of our hero from different days of the week trying to sort out all sorts of issues in the spaceship and the resulting confusion is very, very funny.

In another, Tichy travels to the United Planets as Earth’s delegate, encountering a confusing number of different and strange life forms only to find out that humans were the result of a very strange evolutionary process…. He comes across planets occupied by robots; becomes involved in another time travelling project intended to correct the mistakes of evolution; visits another planet attempting to use ‘evolution by persuasion’ to turn its occupants into underwater creatures; and so on. Each tale is individual and intriguing and very, very clever.

For, much as there was with “The Cyberiad”, there are plenty of hidden meanings here. Lem is quite clearly having a dig at those who try to control everyone; to fit everyone into the same mould; and to re-write the past. On one particular planet, each inhabitant becomes someone else the next day so no-one has an individual identity, and as one character states:

“Know, O uninvited alien… that ours is the knowledge of the ultimate source of all the cares, sufferings and misfortunes to which beings, gathered together in societies, are prone. This source lies in the individual, in his private identity. Society, the collective, is eternal, obeying steadfast an immutable laws, as do the mighty suns and stars. The individual, on the other hand, is characterized by uncertainty, indecision, inconsistency of action, and above all – by impermanence. Therefore we have completely eliminated individuality on behalf of the society. On our planet there are no entities – only the collective.”

Quite how Lem got that past the Soviet censor I don’t know… And in one of the other stories we hear:

You forget where you are and to whom you speak… For six hundred years there has been among us no a single “natural” mind. Thus it is impossible, among us, to distinguish between a thought spontaneous and a though imposed, since no one need secretly impose a thought on anyone else, in order to convince him.

Obviously, using space age settings to make comments on a totalitarian regime was a sensible move. Yes, the stories are very, very funny (I was laughing aloud all the way through) but they’re also a very clever way to get across Lem’s points about the repressive regime under which he was living, human foibles and failures and the dangers of messing with science. The wonderful mix of the absurd and the serious reminded me in some places of Douglas Adams and in others of Calvino; but Lem has a voice all of his own and “The Star Diaries” was a fabulous read.

*****

As an aside, I think translator Michael Kandel definitely deserves some kind of award for rendering this book so brilliantly in English. As I mentioned before, Lem is notoriously hard to translate because of his punning and wordplay in his original language; Kandel has obviously handled this brilliantly and given us English versions that are just as funny, while presumably retaining the brilliance of Lem’s storytelling. There are other collections of Tichy’s stories available, but I’m a little nervous of trying them because they aren’t translated by Kandel…