Lem’s Star Diaries
Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi
Literal: Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest
by Stanisław Lem
I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United
Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has
room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn,
and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the
20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga.
— Michael Main
W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga
intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego,
własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!
Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level.
Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was
just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!
[ex=bare]Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi: Widowisko telewizyjne | Professor
Tarantoga’s strange guest: Television show[/ex] by Stanisław Lem, in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 1963).