Stanislaw Lem
The late great Stanislaw Lem has such a towering reputation for social criticism that we forget that, for most of his career, he had to be extraordinarily careful about how he used it. If he got too comical about the wrong people, his career could easily have come to a quick end in the gulag.
All the same, he couldn’t help himself. In the 1940s, while Lem was still a medical student, he found Josef Stalin too tempting a target to ignore and wrote a satirical opera about (says the “Feedback” columnist in the 18 December 2008 issue of New Scientist) a Soviet secret policeman and the “superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling Josef Stalin.” Then, having written it, he did what any sensible person of that time and place would do. He hid it where it would never be found.
Only that was then. But this is now, and now it has been found — at last, after sixty years of dogged searching. Which American publisher is going to be the first one to translate it into English and publish it for me to read?
Mike says:
So much of Lem’s work has never been translated into English (although it’s made it into other European languages) despite numerous reprints of many of his titles. With even Solaris, his most famous work, not available in a proper English translation, I fear it will be years before such new works appear.
December 24, 2009, 1:39 amKen Houghton says:
Whoever has the good sense to hire Michael Kandel to translate it?
December 24, 2009, 8:12 amBlake says:
Thanks so much for sharing this. Based on the previous comments, I’m not overly optimistic that we will ever see this in print, at least in English. It does sound intriguing.
December 25, 2009, 10:19 pmSebastian Meyer says:
I am lucky in that I am a native German peaker, so I have been reading a lot of Lem’s works, most of which probably never made it into English.
The irony is that it wasn’t translated into English because he was “Russian” author (Polish, actually. But I doubt that distinction would have helped), now he is heralded for his criticism of the regime.
Either way, he is an excellent writer of Hard SciFi as well as character studies of what likely would happen if people are locked in metal tubes in space for a little too long.
January 1, 2010, 3:45 pmBarts says:
While the author of this blog has probably already received an email with unauthorized English translation (with regards from fans from Poland), others might also want to check it, hence I allow myself to share a link to it here:
http://www.ultramaryna.pl/mkk/?p=1639
April 22, 2010, 5:01 amBarts says:
I would also like to take this opportunity to point out to other great Slavic sci-fi author, regrettably unknown to Anglosaxon world: Igor Mozheyko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kir_Bulychev . I would love to see him translated, especially “City above” and “Savages”, stories about human populations separated from the rest of humanity and slowly degrading.
April 22, 2010, 5:03 am