Polish

The Polish language is as grand and magnificent as Latin, as beautifully lapidary and economic as Classical Greek, as succinct as either, and still living and spoken daily.

Polish plumber confesses to literary forgery

Mr Krzystof Mistrz, a self-employed Polish plumber, has confessed to forging the sonnet which has fooled Shakespeare scholars, and was referred to in my penultimate post.


Mr Mistrz, a former English teacher in Poland, said at a press conference yesterday, "It was very easy to do. After all, I trained as a palaeographer, and love English renaissance poetry.


"So, ok, maybe there were a few anachronisms in the Mandeville and Chaucer texts. I'm sorry if I embarrassed anybody. I certainly wasn't trying to cheat anybody - just having a bit of fun.


"Must dash. I have work to do in the British Museum."


Mr Mistrz confessed to more forgeries - the recently discovered manuscripts of hitherto unknown chapters of Mandeville's travels, dealing with the mediaeval author's journeys in the Americas and Australia, a Chaucerian poem, "The Milton Keynes Tales", and an Old English poem, "The Battle of Croydon". All were found in bizarre locations.


The revelations will undoubtedly lead to resignations amongst British and American palaeographers and scholars.

New manuscript found in Bodleian - bad enough to be by Coleridge

Another manuscript has been found by Krzystof Mistrz, a Polish plumber, while working on the ablutions in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.


It appears to be an anonymous (and deservedly so) XIXth century draft of a Romantic or Gothic poem in the style of R. H. Barham on an off-day, or Coleridge at his worst. With apologies I reproduce it below.




Warty Nell


Down in a deep, dark dungeon
Beneath the castle keep,
Where many souls lie starving,
A soulless ragged heap
Of skin and bone,
An aged crone,
Lies brooding while men sleep


Her aged cat and broomstick
Prove she is born of Hell,
And e'en black-hearted Satan
Would fain not guard her cell.
A devil's crew
From evil brew
Concocted Warty Nell.


Any reasonably able child of 9 could have written this: competent, certainly, but jejune.


By way of comparison, I append the opening stanzas of Coleridge's Christabel, of which even a 9 year old would have cause to be ashamed.

CHRISTABEL Part the First

'T is the middle of the night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu--whit! --Tu--whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
'T is a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

-- SAMUEL COLERIDGE 

Non-Stalin Joke, Translated from the Polish.

A policeman on duty finds a dead body lying on the kerb. He gets out his notebook to record the incident, licks his pencil, writes the date, time, name of street, and then comes to "location of the incident".

He writes, 'curb', no, that's not how you spell it; 'cerb?', no, that's not right; 'kurb?', no; 'korb?'.

He gives up trying to spell, kicks the body off the kerb, and writes 'rode'.