Tuesday 10 February 2015

An invitation to a steamroller

'Come and see me in my steamroller, will you?'


This  amused me a lot, like many other similar 'translations' in Stanislaw Baranczak's  Pegaz zdębiał. Poezja nonsensu a życie codzienne: Wprowadzenie w prywatną teorię gatunków (Pegasus fell dumb. Nonsense poetry and everyday life: introduction to a private theory of genres), Puls, London 1995.

The sentence in Polish was: 'Czy moge pania prosic do walca?' which is an invitation do dance the waltz. 'Waltz' is 'walc' in Polish, while 'steamroller' is 'walec', but the genitive of both is 'walca'!
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