Wojciech Orliński: Your books display not only your outstanding knowledge and imagination, but also a great sense of humour. It's amazing, how rarely they are analyzed from this point of view...

Stanisław Lem: I was using humour for various reasons. First, some topics were unsuitable for serious treatment, such as questions of genetics. All those sketches of weird skeletons I drew in the "Star Diaries" were intended to make this subject less horrible. When I was writing that, there were no punks, nobody had a Mohawk haircut, young men did not paint their faces. Nevertheless I had such a feeling, that when mankind will attain control over human genetics, wild things of that kind will happen. Human irresponsibility will lead us to crazy situations. In order to present those crazy situations, I had to create a pattern of levity.

On the other hand, most of my works were written under communism and I had to acknowledge the existence of censorship. For example, when I wrote a story of the first frozen person in "Edukacja Cyfrania" - about an orchestra, whose members are being eaten alive one by one by a cruel Goryllium, but everybody pretends not to notice anything - I had to cover it in a disguise of inseriousness, and add a story of the second frozen person, which had no political hidden meanings. That made it easier to publish the story. I had to use such tricks many times.

If you would try to analyze my books according to the appropriate political period - the Stalin's frost or the Krustschev's softening thaw - you would most certainly find some corelations. On the other hand, I always tried to be as independent, as possible. Naturally, I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me. I tried to expose their absurdity. That is the source of numerous failures of my heroes on the path of improvement of the world, what always ended very bad. Some things are hidden under nicknames. Malapucyus Pandemonius is Karl Marx. Gengenx from "Wizja lokalna" is Friedrich Engels. It's interesting that this was rarely recognized. In "His Master's Voice", which is not at all a humorous story, there is a CIA agent, Wilhelm Eeney, who supervises American scientists. That was simply Janusz Wilhelmi, then in charge of Polish culture. Nobody recognized him. Those are the pleasures of a writer - he can encrypt such messages in his books.

There are thus two kinds of my humour: the first is a camouflage painting, the second are some microrevenges, that the author can take on the surrounding reality. I have to add something which I cannot understand. Here you can see a bookshelf with my Japanese translations. The Japanese could never understand my humour. Nothing is funny in my books for them. The "Star Diaries" were published in Japan, but without such a success, as the books written absolutely seriously. This is a culture completely alien to us.

On the other hand, during the stalinist years I went with my wife to Prague. We did not understand, that in this system you cannot just travel where you like and go to a hotel. All hotels were "busy". But in Vinohrady a receptionist, after having informed us that there were no rooms free, he noticed my name on my passport and suddenly asked: "You wrote Eden? I understand! I understand!". Then he gave us the key. There were situations, when foreign readers understood the story perfectly, only if they came from the same side of the Iron Curtain.

It may be a subject for another interview: to what extent your prose is translatable at all?

Well, more depends here on similarity between cultural environment, than on the translator's skills. I don't speak Japanese, and I don't know what Japanese readers find in my books. I receive some letters from Japan, this proves that they understand at least something. The peak of popularity of my prose is moving. Some time ago I was very popular in the DDR (GDR). They understood perfectly all hidden political messages, because they had the same system. I can proudly say anyway, that my books did not die with the collapse of communism.

I was always concerned about the world-wide promotion of Polish prose. I managed to help two Polish writers to appear on German market, but now they write in German. I wrote only few small texts in German. One of them was a polemic with Leszek Kolakowski. It had to be published in German newspaper to allow him to reply.

Not everyone has enough energy, as Thomas Mann, who dictated to his translator English version of "The Enchanted Mountain". Some time ago I had an excellent translator in Austria, Mrs. Zimmermann. Sometimes weird misunderstandings arise. In USA some educated women, acting in spirit of Jacques Derrida and postmodernism, discovered some freudists meanings in my prose, actually created only by the different idiomatics of English language.

Local specifics are sometimes funny. German encyclopedia call me "a philosopher". I am more popular there, than in Poland. In Russia my "Collected Works" are now in print, I am popular there mostly among scientists. And in Poland I am commonly known as a writer for children: "Pirx" and "The Book of Robots" are now in primary school readings. There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize - it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do. Since 1987 I write no more, sometimes some short-story, just because they ask so much. I am now writing essays for "Tygodnik Powszechny" and "PC Magazine"...