From the dried-up suburb...

After the terrible downpour that caused numerous ponds and brooks to wreak havoc in the neighbourhood we have enjoyed three days of sunshine and warmth. The weather has been conducive to the ground which could absorb more water. Yesterday I didn’t go out anywhere, as every decent PO-voter I just had a barbecue and gobbled up grilled sausages as the fire engines were pumping the water out of flooded gardens. Today I cycled to see the scale of destruction in the southern suburbs of Warsaw…

Here’s the most awful aftermath of the severe rainfalls. The wall of this not that new building collapsed. I don’t know when exactly, but last weekend it was unspoilt and on Friday it looked like this. My version of event is that the land beneath the building slid, foundations sagged and the wall collapsed… Note that the building was put up some forty years ago and for four decades nothing comparable to the Corpus Christi downpour happened. Yes, I know, I should have stopped a bike and then snap. That’s why it’s blurred.

One of many “ponds” in Nowa Wola, I counted around a dozen of similar XXL-puddles. Still one can see there many hoses piping out waters from garages, basements and gardens. Fortunately I saw only one household where the water must have got inside and furniture were put out and drying on a backyard.

I didn’t notice any damages caused by water in Zgorzała, but in Jeziorki things look worse (at first sight and three days after the actual flooding). Here you can see another “temporary lake”, across the tracks, beyond ul. Gogolińska.

A more comprehensive report from this area can be found on W-wa Jeziorki blog – part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. One of the pictures, taken from the platform of W-wa Jeziorki station shows the same Skoda Favorit, waterlogged. I wonder if the engine of hapless car kicks in.

To the right – culprit of flooding on ul. Puławska on Friday morning – an inconspicuous pond on ul. Pozytywki. Who’d suppose its waters could spill over…? Today ul. Pozytywki is passable, I noticed some houses had been underwater as their dwellers put out some of their belongings…

Ul. Puławska is entirely dry. The green cult Tico is still there. On TVN Warszawa I saw a post of a guy who claimed to be the owner of that car. I doesn’t look like a vehicle whose engine wouldn’t start right away… I wanted to photograph the marks of water level in green office building, but a security guard threatened to take away my camera and I had to dash off without snapping the building.

Pond in Mysiadło still floods the area around, but the water on the pavement was shallow enough to cycle through it. What’s going to happen next? Forecasters are issuing warnings against new storms and heavy rainfalls from tomorrow on. Plus we are quite likely to face another disaster, unbearable heat – the temperature in Warsaw may reach +32C on Friday. Needless to say such weather is very conducive to formation of storm clouds…

Uplifting, devastating

Today I’ll let you take in a blend of praising, grumbling and dissomething.

I was delighted to read the report published on Wyborcza.biz, in which Maciej Samsik, journalist of Wyborcza’s business column, x-rays commercials, mostly those of banks, shark loans, financial advisors and telecom operators. Such actions are essential in the education and in the civic society, cause people should be aware of the pitfalls of advertised “bargains” and all “catches” in the suspiciously beneficial contracts. I hold it dear and would love to see more such analyses.

The opposite feelings in me were evoked by the real estate guide by TVN Warszawa. Their report on residential area of Nowa Iwiczna is full of factual errors and misrepresentations. Many of the shots in the footage do not actually show Nowa Iwiczna, bus service 739 does not run through Nowa Iwiczna, its nearest stop is half a mile away from the boundary of the village and distance from the nearest public facilities are much higher than given in the video. And the language, both the voice of the lector and the very content of the report are stilted. Dabbling in translating has sensitised to me that ugly style of Polish – clumsy syntax, bombastic, but trite collocations and illogical sentences are asking for being polished up. I got worked up and posted a comment on journalists’ dependability and erudition.

Ludność wzrosła poprzez budowę nowych osiedli i chęć mieszkania na obrzeżach Warszawy.

This is the most appalling example. In English, a population can rise, but in Polish we use “liczba ludności” and in the context of a small village, it is better to use “liczba mieszkańców”. The corrected sentence will read: Liczba mieszkańców wzrosła na skutek budowy nowych osiedli i mody na mieszkanie na obrzeżach Warszawy.

The poorly written texts lie the core of translators’ ordeal. If the source writing is crappy, the target one is more likely to sound badly. Unless a translator cares and does the editing job. This sentence might also illustrate what many translators grapple with, when they are translating from Polish into English. Polish language gives its user a large dose of freedom when it comes to syntax, German has very strict rules, English lies in the middle, but somewhat closer to German. The fact that it has a correct syntax and lots of constructions is used stylistic devises is often omitted in the teaching process, just like another issue of “natural flow”. The basic problem of the sentence I’m taking into pieces is posed by illogical links. It sounds very dubiously that the rising population is the effect of the new development. Those building were put up because there had been the demand on houses or flats in NI.

A Pole could translate the original sentence without taking any pains to produce anything up-to-standard:

The population grew through the construction of new estates and the willingness to live in the suburbs of Warsaw.

It would be also possible to translate the sentence edited by the author of this blog:

The number of residents rose, as a result of the construction of new estates and the fashion for living in the suburbs of Warsaw.

This also sound poorly, “of” appears three times in one sentence and it surely lacks natural flow, not to mention the syntactic trap.

I came up with two, rather decent translations.

1) Newly built estates and the trend to settle down in the city outskirts have brought about a rise in the number of residents.

2) Springing up development and the suburb-living fad have led to a rise in the number of residents.

It took me around a quarter to get to grips with one sentence, still the biggest flaw is the link between newly built estates and the number of residents. Some elements of those two sentences may be combined to reach a better outcome. If you have any suggestions on how to improve this translation, I will welcome your advice. But fifteen minutes? I think I wouldn’t make a living on translation working in such sluggish pace.

And why the hell haven’t the mentioned clogged up Puławska and commuting nightmare that has become a part of living here?!

The Wednesday afternoon brought the news that Ben Bernanke, the governor of Fed had been awarded the prestigious Time’s Man of the Year title. He is credited with averting a total collapse of financial markets, but the prize reflects only on his past accomplishments and leaves out the ramifications of the current US central bank policy. Economy will sooner or later bear the brunt of excessively low interest rates and quantitative easing. Those who benefit from such policy are the government, which finances and will pay its debts cheaper and financial industry, which uses cheap money to speculate. The ordinary people will sooner or later damn him, like they did with Alan Greenspan (look at the amount of criticism towards him in his wikipedia biography note), if not for the next crisis, then for the inflation tax they will have to pay.

Four years of living in Nowa Iwiczna

It was an extremely hot (36 degrees) Friday, 29th July 2005, when we moved in here. Humid and close day plus sun beating down relentlessly made the weather rather unfavourable for moving, but somehow it went without major problems and unnecessary chaos.

Every anniversary is conducive to some summaries, this time I’ll refrain from them and confine only to a few conclusions.

Within the last two decades NI turned into a typical dormitory town of Warsaw. New housing estates were mushrooming in the years of construction boom, the biggest put up then number more than one hundred terraced houses, lots of them are fenced off, some guarded. Currently I can see new detached houses built by individual investors, but the crisis clamped down on the development of the huge estates.

The new direction of development sets out patterns of lifestyle. In this respect NI is anything but a village. Its residents know almost as little about one another as the dwellers of Warsaw’s fenced off exclusive enclaves. On many estates inhabitants open and close the gates with their remote controls, pull into the garages and from there move to their houses or flats. The neighbours? They say one another ‘good morning’, know one another mostly by sight. There’s usually nobody to turn to in case of emergency, no helping hand around. Settled residents are not the total contradiction of the new ones, there’s one reason why there’s no conflict between those two worlds – the settled sold their land for the plots on which the new houses have been built – there are plenty of former farmers who just cut off coupons from their banks deposits, laze away and make living by the interests of the money they had made on land sale transactions.

According to the official data the number of residents has quadrupled since 2004. Many of the locals are still registered in Warsaw where the previously lived, unfortunately they also pay taxes there, what translated for instance into the condition of local infrastructure – typically Polish – I live in the suburbs, pay taxes in the Warsaw’s borough but demand that the local administration provides a decent road… The time spent on commuting hasn’t changed a lot, I think it even might have shortened a bit, the worst days were during the rebuilding of Puławska street on its two kilometre long section just beyond the border of Warsaw. Now what gets my goat, no matter if drive a car or ride a bus are countless traffic lights, on average they can stop you once in seven hundred metres. That’s not how the road out of capital should look, but almost every road from Warsaw looks like this – on Raszyn towards Katowice and Kraków it looks similarly, Radzymińska towards Białystok it’s even worse, though the newly opened dual carriageway which ends behind Wyszków makes up for the inconveniences (the road is indeed exemplary!). What Puławska street could do with are the service roads (funnily enough there’s no equivalent of this term in Polish, I’ve never seen it translated!), maybe that would unclog it in rush hours…

And what hurts me the most – this village, dormitory town or whatever NI is, lacks SPIRIT, I can’t see anything that could make the place magical, exceptional, there’s nothing in the neighbourhood that would keep a man here, notwithstanding in the late spring evenings when I stroll around the houses I feel I couldn’t move out. And then I get back into the house, go upstairs, want to take a shower, few drops drip and water doesn’t flow. That’s the biggest drawback of my semi-civilised village – water treatment station and underground water resources didn’t manage to catch up with the pace of development, so the ones at the end of the water pipe have to suffer when the ones who live closer unroll their hoses and spill litres of water into their gardens or turn their sprinklers on… This summer is rather wet so since weeks I haven’t experienced the problems with water supply…

For a comparison – two photos of the back of my garden. The first taken on Sunday, 31 July 2005, two days after moving in, the second taken today, showing the same place. Great changeover which took place without any help of professionals’ hands!