Great research. Nice job.
Stanislaw Lem has been awarded the honorary membership of the SFWA in 1973, which was then removed in 1976 after his comments about Science Fiction literature. He descibed it as ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure than ideas or new literary forms. The SWFA then offered him a regular membership, which he refused.
http://www.pobratyn.com/phpwiki/index.p ... slaw%20Lem
A fragment of a story on-line
http://www.lem.pl/english/opowiadania/opowiadania1.htm
I guess the new Solaris is a re-make
1972 version
http://www.pobratyn.com/phpwiki/index.php3?Solaris
2002 version
http://www.chasingthefrog.com/Trailers/ ... olaris.htm
Lem wrote his science-fiction in Polish; the translator was a genius. For example, a verse from a "love poem", specified to be mostly in the language of mathematics:
"I see the eigenvalue in thine eye
I hear the tender tensor of thy sigh;
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cosine two phi."
"Have it compose a poem--a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"
"And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic--"
But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
~ from The Cyberiad, originally written in Polish and translated by Michael Kandel into English
"Trurl! Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavour no end of unforeseeable consequences!" Klapaucius said in a stentorian voice. "If an imperfect imitator, wishing to inflict pain, were to build himself a crude idol of wood and wax, and further give it some makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his torture of the thing would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider the next sculptor who builds a doll with a recording in its belly, that it may groan beneath his blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs for mercy, no longer a crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll that sheds tears, a doll that bleeds, a doll that fears death, though it longs for the peace that only death can bring! Don't you see, when the imitator is perfect, so must be the imitation, and the semblance becomes the truth, the pretense a reality! Trurl, you took an untold number of creatures capable of suffering and abandoned them forever to the rule of a wicked tyrant....Trurl, you have committed a terrible crime!"
~from The Cyberiad
http://www.tealdragon.net/humor/quotes/lem_stan.htm
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:Sl ... n&ie=UTF-8
Cyberiad
Poems from Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad: fables for the cybernetic age.
Cast of characters: Trurl, Klapaucius, and Trurl's poetry machine.
Poem 1
Pev't o' tay merlong gumin gots,
Untle yun furly pa'zzen ye,
Confre an' ayzor, ayzor ots,
Bither de furloss bochre blee!
Poem 2
Mockles! Fent on silpen tree,
Blockards three a-feening,
Mockles, what silps came to thee
In thy pantry dreaming?
Poem 3
Oft, in that wickless chalet all begorn,
Where whilom soughed the mossy sappertort
And you were wont to bong---
Poem 4
The Petty and the Small
Are overcome with gall
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
Poem 5
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
Poem 6
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indicies bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not---for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2.cos(2*phi)!
Poem 7
Arms, and machines I sing, that, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Homo's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Terran shore ...
http://www.geocities.com/krishna_kunchi ... oetry.html
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