Ant marries

I have been preparing for a whole year to present the life of Mrówka, full of unexpected twists. Now, thanks to the contribution of Studiolum, I can share it together with the English translation. The English text appears in a hidden bubble above the Polish originals. For those of you who – like me – for some failure have no command of Polish, this is a great opportunity to put together the story first for yourself on the basis of the pictures only, and then check the author’s version. The illustrator of the book is Aleksandra Woldańska-Płocińska.





















More Polish plumbers.
And an earlier beautiful story on the unpredictability of affections here.

magyarul
en

7 comentarios:

  1. Effe13 de diciembre de 2011, 10:15

    well, marriage is a dangerous place, beware (of plumbers, too)

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  2. MOCKBA16 de diciembre de 2011, 2:55

    Do we have a larger image of page 13? It is the only one which doesn't have a link to a full-size picture (an unlucky number I guess!), and it's hard to interpret the (really sweet) Polish script on an image so small :)

    Some subplots are very familiar, such as the one about the Elephant trading in fine china, or the Coon doing laundry (did we know him from Lilian Moore's tale or from Durov Circus?). But with some other pages, it seems that there is also a reference to some very well-known story ... yet I couldn't figure out what would it be. Like the Ant warrior, is it just a generic entomology allusion, or a literary one?

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  3. Studiolum20 de diciembre de 2011, 17:03

    Until Marguerite responds, I have uploaded a larger version of picture 13 in two parts (unfortunately I only have mutilated scans in large size) here and here

    I think that if there are any subplots behind the scenes, they must be fairly simple and widely known. The comparison with the elephant in the china shop also exists in Hungarian, and precisely w sklepie z porcelaną like Polish, rather than в посудной лавке. Durov’s Tishka doing laundry was unknown to us at that time, but one of the basic Hungarian primers was called “Laundry of Washing Masha”, so we knew her quite well – I don’t know how it was in Poland.

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  4. Studiolum20 de diciembre de 2011, 19:36

    …and, for the sake of nostalgia, here is Tishka!

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  5. Studiolum20 de diciembre de 2011, 21:04

    Don’t think so! Durov really loved his animals.

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  6. MOCKBA21 de diciembre de 2011, 3:02

    I didn't realize that the full cast of characters was right there on the last page! So the uniformed ant is a pharaoh ant, and, if Polish slang was similar to Russian one, then he must be a cop rather than a soldier?

    And of course English and Russian share one strange thing about racoons, that they aren't called laundry-workers in either language (a Russian word, according to Vasmer's dictionary, is a misattribution from a completely unrelated group of ring-tailed furry creatures, the Genettes). But in Latin, and in German, and in Polish, etc., the racoon has the laundry connection right there, in its very name

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  7. Studiolum21 de diciembre de 2011, 7:27

    Actually, the English term also has to do with washing, being a loan word from a native American tongue where it also means “the washing one”…

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