Posts tagged with "Nobel Prize"

Documentary Film About Wisława Szymborska

Posted by Anna 1 Comment
Mar 1 2010

Have you heard about his new documentary about Wisława Szymborska? I haven’t had a chance to watch it, so I can’t give you a proper review, but from what I’m hearing and reading about it, it certainly sounds very interesting. It’s titled – “Sometimes Life is Bearable”, directed by Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit, I am not a fan of poetry, and as tragic as it may seem to my fellow Poles, I haven’t read any of Szymborska’s poems. It’s just not my thing. But she is famous and she got the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996.

I am very interested in seeing the movie, because I don’t know anything about Szymborska as a person. And what I’m reading sometimes gives me a very skewed image of her as a person, and not always very flattering at that.

Anyway, here is the news blurb about the documentary (as a pdf), it’s in English, so go ahead, read it and tell me what you think.

And if you saw the movie, by all means, do tell us what your impression of it was.

image: Wikipedia

The Mysterious Ways of Polish Surnames

Posted by Anna No Comments
Sep 9 2008

My friend called me today and that should be good news, right? But it wasn’t. The poor woman was very stressed and urgently requested my help. You see, she was applying for a visa to one of those countries that still require a woman to provide information about her male guardian, either a father or a husband. So my friend dutifully filled out the visa application form, included her photos, paid the fees and waited. And then waited some more. Finally today she got a letter stating that her visa application was rejected due to her name (as printed in her passport) not matching with the name of her male guardian (father).

She doesn’t live in Poland, and apparently, the officials at the Embassy of The Very Strange Country over there were not familiar with the peculiarities of Polish surnames. And I don’t blame them. Even in the not so strange countries, it’s sometimes hard for the administrative automatons to comprehend the fact that some Polish last names can have both a feminine and a masculine form and some don’t. And that some last names decline (grammatically speaking, of course) and on certain documents they can be printed in different grammatical cases. And that with some last names it’s only the guys’ forms that decline, but not the girls’. Really.

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