Category Archives: education

Polish Realia: Dead Trees in the Woods

Martwe Drewno w Lesie Dead Wood in the Forest

Martwe drewno jest naturalnym i niezbędnym wskładnikiem ekosystemów leśnych. Pozostające w lesie, obumierające i martwe drzewa a także ich fragmenty nie bezwartościowy materiał zaśmiecający las. Jest to nadzwyczaj istotny dla prawidłowego funkcjonowania ekosystemu leśnego zespół mikrośrodowisk życia i miejsc schronienia się lub gniazdowania ogromnej liczby gatunków organizmów żywych (zwierząt, roślin, grzybów).
Dead wood is a natural and essential component of forest ecosystems. Dying and dead trees remaining in the forest, as well as their fragments, are not worthless material littering the forest. It is an extremely important for the proper functioning of the forest ecosystem, a set of microenvironments of life and places of shelter or nesting of a huge number of species of living organisms (animals, plants, fungi).

Martwe drewno może mieć różną postać. Od obumarłych konarów na żywych drzewach poprzez obumierające drzewa, do martwych, leżących na ziemi lub stojących drzew różnej wielkości, leżących na ziemi drobnych gałęzi, wykrotów i złomów. Stopień zaawansowania rozkładu drewna również może być bardzo zróżnicowany. Od drewna jeszcze w pełni świeżego do silnie zbutwiałego przyjmującego postać murszu, przerośniętego grzybnią i korzeniami roślin oraz porośniętego poduchami mchów.
Dead wood can take many forms. From dead branches on living trees, through dying trees, to dead, fallen or standing trees of various sizes, small branches and debris lying on the ground. The degree of advancement of wood decomposition can also vary greatly. From wood still fully fresh to heavily rotten in the form of mulch, overgrown with mycelium and plant roots and overlaid with moss cushions.

Te różnorodne mikrośrodowiska są miejscem życia nadzwyczaj szerokiego spektrum organizmów. Grzyby rozpoczynają i cały czas uczestniczą w procesie rozkładu drewna aż do jego całkowitego rozpadu. Owady i inne bezkręgowce z wielu grup systematicznych żywią się martwym drewnem w różnych stadiach jego rozkładu lub zjadają zasiedlające je inne organizme. Natomiast zwierzęta wykorzystują martwe próchniejące drewno jako miejsce gniazdowania, schronienia, bądz zimowania.
These diverse microenvironments are home to an extremely wide range of organisms. Fungi begin and participate in the process of decomposition of wood until it completely decomposes. Insects and other invertebrates from many systematic groups feed on dead wood at various stages of its decomposition or eat other organisms that inhabit it. On the other hand, animals use dead rotting wood as a place to nest, shelter, or winter.

Martwe drzewa tak naprawdę nie są martwe, bowien żyją życiem ogromnej liczby zasiedlających je organizmów.
Dead trees are not truly dead, because they live the lives of a huge number of organisms that inhabit them.

Ciekawostka! Trivia!
Kloda świerkowa kłada się przecętnie przez 60-80 lat, rozkład starych pni dębowych trwa często nawet 100 lat. Proces rozkładu przebiega szybciej w miejscach wilgotnych i na drewnie leżącym na gruncie niż w miejscach suchych i na drzewie obumarłym jeszcze stojącym.
A spruce log lies for 60-80 years, the decomposition of old oak trunks often lasts up to 100 years. The decomposition process takes place faster in damp places and on wood lying on the ground than in dry places and on dead wood still standing.

Martwe i obumierające drzewa wykorzystywane są przez szereg gatunków ptaków – dziuplaków. Dzięcioły w takich właśnie drzewach wykuwają dziuple a inne dziuplaki zasiedlają je i wykorzystują jako miejsce gniazdowania i schronienia.
Dead and dying trees are used by a number of species of birds – hole-nesters. Woodpeckers carve hollows in such trees, and other hole-nesters inhabit them and use them as nesting and sheltering places.

image here

Animals pictured:
Rębacz pstry ‘ribbed pine borer, spotted sawfly’ Rhagium inquisitor
Gmachówka drzewotoczna ‘carpenter ant’ Campolotus ligniperda
Dyląż garbąrz ‘longhorn beetle’ Prionus sp.
Kruszczyca złotawka ‘golden buckthorn’ Cetonia aurata
Jelonek rogacz ‘stag beetle’ Lucanus cervus
Paśnik palączasty ‘bowhead beetle’ Plagionotus arcuatus

Ryjówka aksamitna ‘common shrew’ Sorex araneus
Jeż europejski ‘western hedgehog’ Erinaceus europaeus

Dzięciol duży ‘great spotted woodpecker’ Dendrocopos major
Dzięciol zielony ‘green woodpecker’ Picus viridis

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Polish Realia: Mushrooms

Jaki to Grzyb? What Mushroom Is This?

Goryczak żółciowy ‘yellow bitter, bile bitterness’ (edible), Tylopilus felleus

Pieprznik jadalny (kurka) ‘Chanterelle’ (edible), Cantharellus cibarius

Lisówka pomarańczowa ‘orange fox’ (inedible), Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

Muchomor sromotnikowa ‘green fly agaric toadstool’ (poisonous), Amanita phalloides

Mleczaj rydz ‘milk thistle’ (edible), Lactarius deliciosus

Borowik szatański ‘red bolete’ (poisonous), Rubroboletus satanas

Koźlarz czerwony ‘red lectern’ (edible), Leccinum aurantiacum 

Krowiak podwinięty (olszówka) ‘curled cowhide’ (poisonous), Paxillus involutus

Borowik szlachetnyBoletus edulis’ (edible), Boletus edulis

Muchomor czerwony ‘red fly agaric toadstool’ (poisonous), Amanita muscaria

Podgrzybek brunatny ‘brown bay bolete’ (edible), Imleria badia

Maślak zwyczajny ‘common butternut squash’ (edible), Suillus luteus

images here

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Making a Model Sports Town, 1960

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle p. 44:

In 1960, the Ministry of Education designated Tanashi a “model sports town” for excellence in “shakai taiiku,” a phrase perhaps best translated as public recreational athletics. The education authorities became involved because, as the Tanashi mayor noted years later, physical education was considered a component of the social studies curriculum (shakai kyōiku). Along the same lines, the local newspaper would later refer to Little League as a form of “extracurricular education” (kagai kyōiku). A nominal matching subsidy accompanied the “model town” designation wherein the town took on a mandate to form a special association to promote sports. Dr. Sasa was a logical choice for president of the Tanashi City Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, which became an umbrella organization akin to what in an American context would be called a city recreation commission. This quasi-official advisory group was closely affiliated with the Tanashi City Education Department but run by local business and community leaders. It oversaw the activities of pre-existing sporting groups and promoted new ones. As of 1961, this recreation commission oversaw sports groups in nanshiki [soft rubber] baseball, kendo, judo, swimming, archery, track and field, and tennis. The new Little League was formed in 1962 under the commission’s purview with Sasa as the inaugural president and the pre-existing nanshiki league’s directors kept as the new league’s board.

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Little League Startups in Japan

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 6-8:

The book’s narrative structure is chronological. Chapter 1, “On Base: Little League’s First Days in Japan,” explores the introduction of Little League for the families of military personnel attached to U.S. bases to the west of Tokyo in the Kantō Plain from 1954. Little League was argued to be a wholesome, distinctively American activity especially suitable for the families living away from the home country, and a method to discipline the bodies and character of youth. Several base leagues across the archipelago experimented on their own initiative with inviting local Japanese communities to field teams in their leagues, but these experiments ended when these bases reverted to Japanese control after the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960.

Chapter 2, “ ‘Mr. Sarge,’ the Red-Headed Giant: Bill Hatch and the Original Little League in Japan,” follows Airman William “Bill” Hatch’s pioneering creation in the summer of 1959 of the first extant Japanese Little League, Kunitachi, as noted above the first Japanese league to send a team to the World Series in 1962. Hatch and his wife Akiko’s efforts were celebrated by both the Japanese and U.S. governments as exemplars of Cold War cultural diplomacy, and were enthusiastically supported by local businesses as well as by U.S. military and American expat business and service organizations in Tokyo. The Hatches success in creating two local leagues set the foundation for Little League’s Far East Region Directors to proactively encourage Japanese participation in base leagues as well as form their own programs.

Chapter 3, “A League of Japan’s Own: The Early Innings,” explores the creation of a national Japanese Little League organization in 1964, and their successful efforts to overcome government institutional inertia that prevented Japan’s 1963 team from traveling to Williamsport. Restrictions on elementary school competition were a durable legacy of prewar bureaucratic management of baseball as a form of education, and of postwar reforms intended to counter elitism of any form in the interest of democratizing Japan. Despite a visit to Tokyo by Little League International President Peter J. McGovern, and growing popular enthusiasm for youth athletics in the year of the Tokyo Olympics, the Ministry of Education still demurred from granting an exemption in late summer 1964. But a resourceful Kondō Takeshi, a twenty-something trading company white-collar worker and future Japanese ambassador, found a work-around to this bureaucratic intransigence in what he called the democratic tactic of “constituency politics,” getting the Foreign Minister to issue passports anyway.

Chapter 4, “Fly Balls and Daring Plays: The Middle Innings,” follows itinerant Little League promoter Mitsuyasu Momotarō’s intentional creation of Little League in the four cities of Musashino, Koganei, Mitaka, and Chōfu in the western Tokyo suburbs in 1966 and 1967. Under the mentorship of elementary school teacher Kamei Ryō, Musashino City had the strongest of the four teams in what constituted the “West Tokyo” Little League that won Japan’s first World Series title in 1967. For unknown reasons, half of the West Tokyo team sent to Williamsport in 1967 consisted of players from the better organized and presumably better funded Kansai region of Japan, and Kamei was replaced by Chōfu construction company owner Hayashi Kazuo. Enthusiasm over West Tokyo’s success led to large numbers at tryouts for each of West Tokyo’s constituent teams, with each team expanding into their own leagues in 1969. Hayashi grew Chōfu’s program into the powerhouse league of the 1970s, becoming the face of Little League in Japan, even being inducted into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame soon after his passing in the early 2010s. Mitsuyasu’s role was forgotten.

Chapter 5, “Mgr. Kōno Goes to Williamsport: A Provincial Coach and City Make Good,” describes Osaka entrepreneur Yoshikura Toshio’s organization of a vibrant Osaka-based Little League regional association, known as the Kansai Renmei, and the respective ways provincial city Wakayama fielded teams from 1966 through 1968. Wakayama, located on the other end of the Nankai Railway Line from Osaka, had its fair share of entrepreneurial energy characteristic of this era of high-growth Japan, and it had a rich history of baseball at both the high school and, in the form of nanshiki rubber baseball, the elementary school levels. An ad hoc all-star team chosen from that summer’s Wakayama City nanshiki tournament represented Japan in the 1966 Little League World Series. In 1968, an independently organized Wakayama Little League team practiced together every day from March through the summer to earn Japan’s second, consecutive, victory in the World Series. Based on extensive interviews with players, we learn how the team formed and trained intensively under their manager, Kōno Yoshio, who later gained fame for leading Wakayama Tōin High School’s team to the pinnacle of Japan high school baseball at the Kōshien tournament.

Chapter 6, “The Great Little Schism and Mitsui/Sankei Sponsorship: Two Youth Hardball Programs Instead of One,” explores the frustrations that Kansai Renmei founder Yoshikura experienced as he chafed under Little League rules he felt were overly simplified and not suited to Japanese realities, at the same time Mitsui Bussan trading company and the Sankei media group became long-term corporate sponsors. In 1970 Yoshikura decided to abandon Little League and form his own Boys League that became Little League Japan’s major competitor. Meanwhile, a young Mitsui employee in the Public Relations department was tasked with negotiating Kansai media rights from Sankei rival Yomiuri, but he found himself first having to negotiate Little League out of an unorthodox fundraising arrangement with the local underworld.

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Baseball Research in Occupied Japan

Here’s a book that appeared just in time for the latest World Baseball Classic and the latest Asian Studies Association meeting. I’ll have to restrain myself from sharing too many excerpts from it.

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 4-6:

American faith in baseball as constitutive of “all that was good” led the authorities during the U.S. Occupation of Japan immediately after World War II to sponsor its resurgence. Baseball in Japan had come on hard times under wartime austerity partly because it was the enemy’s game, and partly because it was thought to be indulgent, a kind of luxury that was also called the “enemy” in a wartime slogan, zeitaku wa teki (“luxury is the enemy”). The Americans assumed baseball would help democratize postwar Japan because of its intrinsic American-ness. But it wasn’t as if baseball was a foreign pastime. It had been a vibrant part of Japanese life since the late nineteenth century. Japanese went along with the American discourse on baseball and democracy for their own reasons, but mainly so they could play and watch baseball again. In my capacity as president of a small-town league I had already been primed to consider the social impact of youth baseball. As a historian I perceived an opportunity to examine how two distinctive national cultures imbued the game with different values.

An alternative and immediately more obvious research question was, simply, why were the Japanese teams that arrived in Williamsport so consistently among the best? Over the course of my research the American popular press reported what I already knew, that Japanese teams practiced year-round and dawn to dusk on weekends. But surely there was more to it than that. There is a vibrant community of scholars and knowledgeable fans writing on the Japanese high school and professional games, but a literature survey showed no scholarship on Japanese Little League—none in English, and very little in Japanese. The Japanese-language studies focused for the most part on the deleterious effects on young arms throwing hardball, plus a few sociological studies from the 1970s. For a historian, it is exciting to come across a topic that no one has written about. And I felt I had special insight since postwar Japanese history was my specialty and I had a half dozen years’ experience helping to run a Little League in the United States.

A visit to Little League’s Peter J. McGovern Museum suggested reconstructing this history was going to involve much more than the archival work of conventional history research. Apart from some marginally relevant correspondence, a smattering of mentions in Little League newsletters, and the occasional recent testimonial by visiting U.S. veterans who happened to have played some small role in its origins, not much documentation remained from the early years. As archivist Adam Thompson explained, Little League had moved offices every few years as the international program grew, and likely much of the documentation was simply tossed.

Although Little League Japan had been founded in 1964, their head office was small and had no archive. What I discovered on my first visit to Tokyo was that no one knew much, and those that knew a little often mis-remembered, usually because of logical but faulty assumptions. The Little League Japan leadership provided a vague explanation that Little League got started on American military bases and from there spread to local Japanese communities, and that at some point the trading company Mitsui Bussan and the media company Fuji Sankei began to support the program, as they still do. But beyond that, memories of dates and names for the early years were as misty as a riverside field on a cool autumn morning. For example, the website for the Kunitachi League, the first Japanese team to play in the World Series, indicated that the Little League got started in that western Tokyo suburb in 1949; but a search of back numbers of the U.S. military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes revealed that Little League did not appear in Japan until 1954, and then only inside the American military dependent community. In 2015, when prominent Chōfu Little League and Little Senior (teenage) League president Hayashi Kazuo was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, it was stated that he started the formal Little League organization in 1964 with Mitsui and Fuji Sankei support. But one of my earliest contacts from Mitsui with firsthand knowledge insisted his company didn’t get involved until 1969. So, I knew if I embarked on this project, the first steps would demand an old-fashioned kind of history. Before considering the big questions, I had to deduce the nitty-gritty developments from as many sources as I could: newspaper clippings, old commemorative pamphlets, municipal histories, contemporary sociological studies, interviews with former players, as well as the various baseball episodes in contemporary literature, film, school readers, and the graphic youth cultures of manga and anime.

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Kapuściński Joins the Party, 1953

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 55-57:

In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.

It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.

Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.

My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.

On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’

Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)

In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:

1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,

2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,

3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,

4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,

5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.

‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’

Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.

On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.

Comrade Kersten takes the floor:

‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’

Another comrade polemicizes:

‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’

Comrade Geremek stipulates:

‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’

Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:

‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’

Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.

‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’

From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.

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Pole Useless in China, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 61-62, 71-72:

With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage.

I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too, that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

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Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

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Herodotus Awaits Stalin

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 5-6:

Before those future prophets proclaiming the clash of civilizations, the collision was taking place long ago, twice a week, in the lecture hall where I learned that there once lived a Greek named Herodotus.

I knew nothing as yet of his life, or about the fact that he left us a famous book. We would in any event have been unable to read The Histories, because at that moment its Polish translation was locked away in a closet. In the mid-1940s The Histories had been translated by Professor Seweryn Hammer, who deposited his manuscript in the Czytelnik publishing house. I was unable to ascertain the details because all the documentation disappeared, but it happens that Hammer’s text was sent by the publisher to the typesetter in the fall of 1951. Barring any complications, the book should have appeared in 1952, in time to find its way into our hands while we were still studying ancient history. But that’s not what happened, because the printing was suddenly halted. Who gave the order? Probably the censor, but it’s impossible to know for certain. Suffice it to say that the book finally did not go to press until three years later, at the end of 1954, arriving in the bookstores in 1955.

One can speculate about the delay in the publication of The Histories. It coincides with the period preceding the death of Stalin and the time immediately following it. The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out. The atmosphere was tense. The censors redoubled their vigilance.

But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous—from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?

And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there! The Histories consists of nine books, and each one is allusions heaped upon allusions. Let us say he opens, quite by accident, Book Five. He opens it, reads, and learns that in Corinth, after thirty years of bloodthirsty rule, the tyrant called Cypselus died and was succeeded by his son, Periander, who would in time turn out to be even more bloodthirsty than his father. This Periander, when he was still a dictator-in-training, wanted to learn how to stay in power, and so sent a messenger to the dictator of Miletus, old Thrasybulus, asking him for advice on how best to keep a people in slavish fear and subjugation.

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Polish Animal Idioms

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Marek Kępa titled The Peculiar World of Polish Animal Idioms. Here’s his intro:

Curious what it means to have a snake in one’s pocket or buy a cat in a bag? In this article, Culture.pl discusses popular Polish animal idioms – presenting their literal translations, explaining their figurative meanings and providing examples of their use in Polish texts. Be advised: some of the animal idioms found here might sound peculiar to English speakers!

And here’s the list, without his explanations and examples:

  • Pierwsze koty za płoty ‘First cat over the fence’
  • Kupić kota w worku ‘To buy a cat in a bag’
  • Siedzieć jak mysz pod miotłą ‘To sit like a mouse under a broom’
  • Nudzić się jak mops ‘To be bored like a pug’
  • Nie dla psa kiełbasa ‘The sausage isn’t for the dog’
  • Ciągnie wilka do lasu ‘A wolf is drawn to the woods’
  • I wilk jest syty, i owca cała ‘The wolf is full and the sheep’s unscathed’
  • Na bezrybiu i rak ryba ‘When there’s no fish, a crayfish is a fish’
  • Czuć się jak ryba w wodzie ‘To feel like a fish in water’
  • Mieć węża w kieszeni ‘To have a snake in one’s pocket’
  • Robota nie zając, nie ucieknie ‘Work is not a hare, it won’t run off’
  • Koń by się uśmiał ‘A horse would laugh at that’
  • Znać się jak łyse konie ‘To know each other like bald horses’
  • Gapić się jak cielę na malowane wrota ‘To stare like a calf at a painted gate’
  • Jedna jaskółka wiosny nie czyni ‘One swallow doesn’t make it spring’

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