The minister of Culture in Warsaw has issued a Directive banning certain books from the lists of texts to be studied in Polish schools for the national curriculum.
Witold Gombrowicz is banned for homosexuality; Herling-Grudzinski, who wrote of the gulags long before Solzhenitsyn, too. These are not left intellectual classics, to say the least, but banned they are.
As is Goethe (too German, and immoral for writing of characters entering into pacts with the Devil); Kafka (condemned with a single word, Nihilist); Dostoyevsky (too much attention to a criminal's confessions in Crime and Punishment).
The peculiar twins who run Poland have called in the Directive for 'consideration' after an outburst by Adam Michnik (of Solidarnosc fame), but the Teletubbies (gay) are not offered such distinguished defenders.
The Roman Catholicism that keeps an Index of banned books is alive and vigorous in Blair's favourite European ally.
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14 comments:
Bizarre , I `m not sure i `m against burning books in principle though. Words and actions are part of a spectrum and unless you think language is no more thna a bourgeois game then books can be mortal enemies
It's hard to agree that books, or any length of writing, have no effect. Actually it's patently untrue.
So, N, what shall we fling onto the pyre?
Perhaps there should be categories? Literary, political, methodological, tracts, plays, poems.....
Books depicting sexual acts performed on children?
Anything by Andrew Motion.
(not necessarily in that order)
Lord of the Rings:
"Do not tell me that he has changed his mind and will send me away with the maidens! But no, the last wains have gone".
or
"Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!'
(all exclamation marks as in original).
I am willing to renounce my right to burn books - which you would happily grant me - in exchange for you and anybody else refraining from burning any other books, which might well include some that I love and cherish.
Also, it's a slippery slope. You start by burning books and end up
burning people, which is bad.
Finally, people who burn books condemn themselves and their folks to ignorance, and end up scolded by their own stupidity.
So don't. Or else.
Some corrections. First, the list you mention is a proposal for discussion. Second, minister Giertych didn't offer reasons for excluding some of the authors - what you write is pure speculation. He only explained why he wants to add new names (Sienkiewicz, Dobraczynski, John Paul II) and said place should be made for them by deleting others. Third, no one is baning these books. If the proposal will be accepted, students won't be simply obliged to read them anymore.
Anon, the list is published as a list and was called in by the government after protest, not just 'books up for discussion'. The minister may not have spelled out reasons, but others that belong to his party have. There has been considerable concern expressed at the anti- German voices consistently being heard, in Poland as there has at the anti-gay .
I am convinced by Citizen's protest that banning is a slippery slope etc. and withdraw the plan to ban. An obligation to read Goethe replaces it, though translations are permitted. (They'll have to be if we get into Gombrowicz, but we'll be alright with Conrad).
I am with you on Lord of the Rings HG
And what about Norman Mailer?
Are the Poles okay with Ruth Rendell? I shan't go there if they don't like her.
I guess if you are a gay German, Poland's not a good place to visit?
Mind unsullied by Norman Mailer, L, but I quite resent the sludge, much of it Lord of the Rings generated, in my mind sump.
There's something horrid about Ruth Rendell, Flash, a patronising, mean, nulabourish attitude to social issues coupled with a false social conscience. Though I mention false conciousness with reserve.
And have you heard Radio Maria (I think it's called) Flash?
You'll need a Polish speaker to translate, but they're usually to ashamed to do so.
Awe, HG! I thought you were sending me to a radio station for gay Poles! Did I get a shock! Although the USA version I listened to may not be as extreme as the Polish one you mention?
I don't know who that author is that you mentioned: I was talking about a British murder mystery writer.
;^)
Poles should do gay, F, all those mazurkas and polkas. I heard radio Maria being re broadcast on radio 4 as a scary example of modern anti-semitism. I thought it was a fake at first; literally I'd never heard such stuff.
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