Saturday, February 4, 2012

"News from Poland," Radio News at thenews.pl

Annie Zdrojewski wrote a while back with a news flash about Bogdan Zdrojewski.  What, you don't remember Bogdan?  Well, Bogdan Zdrojewski is the Polish Minister of Culture, that's what.  His office last July released a publicity item in which he praised the chosen design for the new Polish History Museum to be built in Warsaw.

"Culture Minister hails Polish History Museum design"

This site has some fun stuff, as I found by looking around a bit.  There's an announcement of casting efforts for a bilingual production of Romeo and Juliet, to be produced in London. The idea is to demonstrate the opposition of the House of Montague with the House of Capulet by having Romeo's family speak Polish and Juliet's speak English!  What a great way to dramatize communications problems - although probably in the original tale the two houses understood each other perfectly well and hated each other for other reasons - but that is no matter.

Very striking, to me, is hearing the radio announcer speak.  I nearly fell out my chair.  His first language is obviously Polish, and his second is BBC-style British English with all those "plummy vowels."  It's not what one heard on the East Side of Buffalo back in the day!  So I recommend heartily the link below;  one then clicks the little black-and-white audio icon just under the main title of the news item.

"Polish Romeo and English Juliet"


Julie

1 comment:

jzdro said...

And, about 10-15 years ago, a Zdrojewski with a different given name than Bogdan, was the head of Poland's equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration.