dwutygodnik - strona kultury

25 2011

HALF A PAGE: On the Death of Andrzej Lepper

BY Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

Death is death is death. A cross was put up after his death, and under the cross candles were lit

I felt a certain attachment to Andrzej Lepper, despite his career as a demagogue and scoundrel, because he was also real, in some painful way, and he reminded me of my country.

Death is death is death. A cross was put up after his death, and under the cross candles were lit. Law and Justice party wants to establish a “Committee for the Fight Against Death”, to be named after Andrzej Lepper.

“Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it…” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1980).

translated by Arthur Barys

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, born 1958, cultural anthropologist, essayist, author of Blood Legends. Anthropology of a prejudice (2008) and other works.

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