>>anarba+(OP)
Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.

>>woleiu+1m
He is also known among programmers for The Cyberiad, which is available in an amazing English translation by Michael Kandel. The Cyberiad is a collection of tales about two Constructor robots who travel together and try to outdo each other at creating bizarre and often disastrous inventions to solve problems on different planets.

Edit: Here is a snippet in which Klaupacius challenges Trurl's latest invention, the electronic bard, to compose "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics," and gets a response: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/cyberiad.html

>>anarba+(OP)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508336

>>anarba+(OP)
Probably my favorite story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

>>JoeAlt+0h
The DKIST, a 4m diffraction limited solar telescope on top of a mountain in hawaii https://dkist.nso.edu/, comes online in science mode before the end of the year. It will be able to resolve tens of kilometer scale structures on the sun for the first time. There's still a lot left to be discovered on these small scales as the short timescale coherent radio emissions have indicated for decades. DKIST will give us our first images of whatever is making these very short radio burst... and whatever else is there we didn't predict.

>>anarba+(OP)
I wish the subject of "solar life" was explored more in sci-fi. It's something that shows up every now and then, but rarely in any detail, or significant to the plot.

For another example along these lines, there's David Brin's "Sundiver": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96472.Sundiver

>>pdonis+ww
It seems to me that the English poem is indeed Kandel's original. There are very few similarities to the Polish version, other than the general theme. I found Lem's poem here: http://www.matematyka.wroc.pl/book/stanislaw-lem-zakochany-c...

>>anarba+(OP)
Marcin Wichary translated one of Lem's stories from Polish to English, and wrote an article about the translation process.

https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor...

>Marcin Wichary: This is a backstory of why I translated Stanisław Lem’s short story One hundred and thirty-seven seconds.

>Translations of [Lem’s] works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. — Wikipedia

https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...

>One hundred and thirty-seven seconds: A short story by Stanisław Lem published in 1976, translated from Polish in 2015 by Marcin Wichary

>Translator’s note: This is my first translation of a Stanisław Lem story. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original as much as possible, which means original occasional odd idioms, mismatched units, and kilometer-long sentences. The story was published in 1976, and predates desktop publishing and the Internet. To the best of my knowledge, Lem has never visited America. If you are interested, read more about why I translated this story and the translation process.

Marcin actually stalked Stanislaw Lem in person when he was a boy:

>Memoirs of a train traveller: The day I stalked Stanisław Lem

>[...] It must’ve been early 1990s when I read somewhere that Stanisław Lem actually lives in Cracow and quickly, with a naïveté characteristic of a 14-year-old, I formulated a plan — I would go and visit him while we were there.

Then he went on years later to create the Lem Google Doodle! (Not to mention the PacMac one too!)

Stanisław Lem on Google’s homepage:

https://mwichary.medium.com/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepa...

60th Anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's First Publication:

https://www.google.com/doodles/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw...

Interactive Lem Google Doodle:

https://www.google.com/logos/lem/

Stanislaw Lem Google Doodle Album:

https://get.google.com/albumarchive/113565878895173133979/al...

I have always wanted to ask Michael Kandel how he translated the poetry of the Electric Bard from The First Sally of Cyberiad.

Especially the one that is "A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

I was curious to see that poem in the original Polish, even though I don't know that language, just to compare them. I'd much appreciate hearing from a native Polish speaker how they compare.

Wonderful Poems:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...

Horrible Poems:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/HorriblePoems.ht...

I asked Marcin about it, and he linked me to the original Polish version of the Electric Bard -- try translating it to English with google translate to appreciate how astronomically more excellent Michael Kandel's translation is than a machine translation. I really wish I could read and appreciate it in the original Polish!

https://web.archive.org/web/20190814065711/http://niniwa22.c...

Michael Kandel's Wonderful Translation:

    This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:

    The Petty and the Small
    Are overcome with gall
    When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
    Klapaucius too, I ween,
    Will turn the deepest green
    To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.

Google Translate's Horrible Translation:

    Trurl was thrashing here and there, suddenly something crackled, 
    the press and the machine very matter-of-factly, calmly, declared:

    Envy, pride, egoism forces us to be petty.
    He will experience this by desiring to go with Electricity
    In competition, a certain simpleton.
    But Klapaucius
    The giant will overtake the spirit like a turtle in a car.

Here's an article about Lem translations that aptly describes Michel Kandel:

Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stanislaw...

>Lem’s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations — some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel — each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It’s hard to keep up with Lem’s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.

>>versio+h91
I used (and attributed) some of the wonderful cover art and illustrations by Lem and Mroz and others from his web site, to illustrate this article about "GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine":

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

Here are some of Lem's drawings:

https://english.lem.pl/gallery/lems-drawings

And Daniel Mróz's covers and illustrations:

https://english.lem.pl/gallery/mroz-drawings

And some fantastic cover art:

https://english.lem.pl/gallery/covers

And Lem's photo album:

https://english.lem.pl/gallery/photo-album

>>donut+zf1
its Prawda.

It was part of The Invincible and Other Stories according to wikipedia [0]

[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niezwyci%C4%99%C5%BCony_i_inne...

>>B1FF_P+lm1
Probably not, the name goes before the surname in Polish (like in English), so saying "Tichy Ijon" would sound a bit unnatural, even if the 'Citizen Tichy Ijon' form was promoted in communist time, probably as a borrowing from a more formal Russian?

The word 'tichy' means 'silent' in Czech/Slovakian, and maybe in some smaller Polish dialects.

Though http://encyklopediafantastyki.pl/index.php?title=Ijon_Tichy claims that "the ancestor of Tichy was called Cichy (the silent one in Polish), but the official putting down the name in the official register was lisping"

>>ASalaz+Vb1
For me too, but it was actually two novels in one book, "The Invincible" and "Solaris", and I was young back then (maybe 8yo), and didn't understand that one novel can ends in the middle of the book. Was quite puzzled about the change of topic mid-flight.

My favorite book is "Wizja Lokalna", the title has been translated to English as 'Observation on the Spot' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_on_the_Spot). It's a wonderful allegory of problems related to the concept of the 'world of abundance' vs 'communism/authoritarianism'. The presented problems (ethico-sphere, abundance of material thing) are serious and well researched and described, even if in a humorous fashion.