Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

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Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (born March 6, 1909 as de Tusch-Letz in Lemberg , Austria-Hungary , † May 7, 1966 in Warsaw ) was a Polish poet and aphorist .

Life

Lec comes from an upper-class family who lived in Czortków in Galicia . His father, Benno Letz de Tusch, was a bank director. The mother Adele, daughter of Jan de Safrin, is said to be descended from Sephardic Jews. The spelling Letz corresponds to the kuk documents. When the Russian army conquered eastern Galicia in 1914 , the family fled to Vienna.

From 1927 to 1933, Lec studied Polish and law in Lemberg, graduating with a “Magister juris”. He then went to Warsaw, where he wrote as a lyricist and also as a satirist for various papers ( Szpilki (= needles), Sygnały , Lewar , Lewy Tor , Skamander and Czarno na Białem ), which can be assigned to part of the left-wing intellectual scene. His first volume of poetry colors appeared in 1933; Zoo followed in 1935 . He found his style with the Pathetic Satires published in Warsaw in 1936 .

With the outbreak of World War II and the German and Soviet conquest of Poland, Lec went back to Lviv. There he worked for Soviet propaganda. After the invasion of German troops in 1941, he was arrested here and taken to the Tarnopol concentration camp, from which he fled in 1943. In the following years he joined the Polish partisans. After the liberation, Marcel Reich-Ranicki worked under the 35-year-old Lec in a propaganda and translation unit of the Polish People's Army . He was a member of the communist party PPR and the communist resistance GL / AL .

In 1945 Lec helped found the satirical magazine Szpilki and in 1946 published poems in the volume Feldnotizbuch . In the same year he published the satirical tape A Cynic's Walk .

From 1949 to 1950 he lived in Vienna as a press attaché . Before he was recalled, he moved to Israel , but returned to Warsaw in 1952. In 1948 he published Das Leben ist ein Scherzgedicht , and in 1950 Neue Gedichte , some of which had already appeared in Vienna in 1949 under the title Über Brücken schreitend in German. The poems from his time in Israel appeared in the Jerusalem manuscript in 1956 . With the Polish events in October 1956 , which led to the liberalization of Stalinist politics in Poland, his career as a Polish aphorist began.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec's grave at Powązki Cemetery

Lec was also mainly inspired by his translations of poems by Goethe , Grillparzer , Lessing , Morgenstern and above all by Heine , but also by Kraus and Ringelnatz . In addition to Uncoated Thoughts (1959), he published From a thousand and one joke poem (1959), I mock and asked for the way (1959), An Abel and Kain (1961), Briefing (1963), Poems on the go (1964). In 1964 the New Uncoated Thoughts and 1966 Epigramlese appeared .

Lec died in Warsaw on May 7, 1966. He received a state funeral with military honors and was buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.

In the 1970s, the beginning of the friendlier Ostpolitik, a handful of aphorisms by Lec, who had already died at that time , were regularly published in ZEIT . His aphorisms, of which more than 2,500 have been published in the various editions of “Uncoated Thoughts” - the title is a quote from Heinrich Heine - cast a razor-sharp, critical and sometimes very sarcastic light on the then Stalinist Polish state with its oppressive claims wanting to control thinking.

Aphorisms

  • When I am born a second time, I will register under a wrong name.
  • When there is nothing to laugh about, satirists are born.
  • Go with the times, but come back from time to time.
  • It takes great patience to learn them.
  • Many who were ahead of their time had to wait for them in very uncomfortable accommodations.
  • The first requirement for immortality is death.
  • It's a shame that you drive to paradise with a hearse.
  • All gods were immortal.
  • Maybe God himself chose me to be an atheist.
  • One cannot play the "song of freedom" on the instrument of violence.
  • The clock strikes. All.
  • Love your enemies, it may damage their reputation.
  • His conscience was pure. He never used it.
  • I would have understood a lot if it had n't been explained to me .
  • Technology is on the way to such perfection that humans can do without themselves.

... and his own obituary:

  • He's not dead. He's just changed the way he lives.

Works

Original editions:

  • 1933 Barwy (colors)
  • 1946 Spacer cynika (A Cynic's Walk)
  • 1946 Notatnik polowy (field notebook )
  • 1948 Życie jest fraszką (Life is a joke poem)
  • 1950 Nowe wiersze (New Poems)
  • 1956 Rękopis jerozolimski (Jerusalem manuscript)
  • 1957 Myśli nieuczesane (Unbrushed Thoughts)
  • 1959 Z tysiąca i jednej fraszki (From a thousand and one joke poem)
  • 1959 Kpię i pytam o drogę (I scoff and asked for directions)
  • 1961 Do Abla i Kaina (To Abel and Cain)
  • 1963 List gończy (profile)
  • 1964 Myśli nieuczesane nowe (New Uncoated Thoughts)
  • 1964 Poema gotowe do skoku (Poems on the go)

German-language editions

  • Walking over bridges. Poems . With a foreword by Franz Theodor Csokor . Two mountains, Vienna 1950
  • Uncoated thoughts . Edited and translated from Polish by Karl Dedecius . Pictures by Herbert Pothorn. Hanser , Munich 1959
  • New uncoated thoughts . Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius. Pictures by Daniel Mróz . Hanser, Munich 1964
  • Last uncoated thoughts. Aphorisms . Edited and translated from Polish by Karl Dedecius. With five drawings by Heinz Edelmann . Hanser, Munich 1968
  • Late reading of uncoated thoughts . Edited and translated from Polish by Karl Dedecius. Hanser, Munich 1976
  • The great book of uncoated thoughts. Aphorisms, epigrams, poems and prose . Hanser, Munich 1971
  • All uncoated thoughts . Hanser, Munich 1982
  • The very last uncoated thoughts . With drawings by Zygmunt Januszewski. Hanser, Munich 1996
  • Profiles. Epigrams, prose, poems . Hanser, Munich 1986
  • All uncoated thoughts. Plus prose and poems . Hanser, Munich 1996. New edition: Sanssouci, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-8363-0058-3
  • Love your enemies, it may damage their reputation. Unframed thoughts of power . Selected by Heiner Geißler , illustrated by Jiří Slíva . Sanssouci, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7254-1221-9 .

literature

  • Karl Dedecius: last safe haven for Stanislaw Jerzy Lec . Hanser, Munich 1966
  • Peter Krupka: The Polish Aphorism. Stanisław Jerzy Lec's ›Unfrizzled Thoughts‹ and their place in Polish aphorism . Sagner (Slavic Articles 104), Munich 1976
  • Pawel Bak: The metaphor in translation. Studies on the transfer of the aphorisms by Stanisław Jerzy Lec and the poems of Wisława Szymborska . Lang (Danzig Contributions to German Studies 20), Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 3-631-55757-4
  • Marta Kijowska : The ink is an explosive. Stanisław Jerzy Lec - the master of straight thinking. Hanser, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-44623-275-4

Web links

Wikiquote: Stanisław Jerzy Lec  - Quotes

proof

  1. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: My life. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1999
  2. ↑ From late harvest of uncoated thoughts . Edited and translated from Polish by Karl Dedecius. Hanser, Munich 1976, p. 194
  3. ↑ Most of the information on life and work can be found in the afterword by Karl Dedecius to Alle ungfrierten thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 307ff.
  4. ^ The large manual of quotations, Hans-Horst Skupy, Munich 2013, p. 310
  5. ↑ All unfrizzled thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 13
  6. ^ All unfrizzled thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 25
  7. ^ All unframed thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 28
  8. ^ All unframed thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 16
  9. ^ All unfrizzled thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 9
  10. ^ All unfrizzled thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 54
  11. ↑ All unfrizzled thoughts , Hanser, Munich 1982, p. 98
personal data
SURNAME Lec, Stanislaw Jerzy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tusch-Letz, Stanisław Jerzy de (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish poet and aphorist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Lviv , today Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1966
Place of death Warsaw , Poland