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Lem’s Star Diaries

Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi

Literal: Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest No English release

by Stanisław Lem
I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn, and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the 20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga.
— Michael Main
W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego, własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!
Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level. Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!
English
DEBUT
[ex=bare]Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi: Widowisko telewizyjne | Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest: Television show[/ex], in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963).
VARIANTS
3 Polish variants
DERIVATIVE WORKS
  1. Professor Tarantoga und sein seltsamer Gast by Dr. Albrecht Börner, directed by Jens-Peter Proll, (Deutscher Fernsehfunk, East Germany, circa 21 April 1979).
TAGS(SPOILERS!)
Time Periods Timeline Models
  • Time Barrier: “Clearly not, because Archirix ordered a special barrier of time-absorbers to be built.
Time Travel Methods
  • Time Ships: “Have you seen a chronobus? But of course, you probably have other, older models. It looks like a flatbread, round, sort of like two plates folded together, only very large.”
Themes
  • Never Change the Past!: “But you can’t get out. You can’t even stick your leg out in cas you change something or whatever. I really don’t know. In any case, it’s prohibited.
  • Nude Travel: “I wasn’t dressed at all. You can’t leave the chronobus wearing clothes. I had to take everything off. . . .”
  • Time Travel Agencies, Safaris, and Tourists: “And on such chronobuses, you arrange excursions into the past?”
Fictional Tags Groupings
TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)
  1. From an unspecified place, possibly on Mars, the fourth millinnium ⋙ to an unspecified location on Earth, AD 1962. Note: Nowak-Hipperkorn leapt from the touring chronobus.
  2. From an unspecified place, possibly on Mars, the fourth millinnium ⋙ to an unspecified location on Earth, AD 1962. Note: At the end, the guest’s “wife” comes to fetch him. We assume she’s also from the future and not from the asylum, but we don’t know for sure and we don’t know what happened after she took him.
INDEXER NOTES (SPOILERS!)
  • 1963 Published Script—For us, the 1963 script and the Polish 1971 made-for-TV movie are variants of the same work rather than separate works because the 1963 publication was an actual TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) rather than a story, and we believe that the TV film was adapted from the script more or less directly, although it could have been expanded or otherwise revised.
  • 1971 Polish TV Film—The director was Tadeusz Worontkiewicz as per <a href='http%3A%2F%2Fwww.art.intv.pl%2FWorontkiewicz_T.%2FRealizacje%2F'>a filmography of his work</a>, which also lists the year as 1971. We have no other details of its broadcast, although it probably appeared on TVP1 or TVP2, since those were the only two TV stations in Poland in 1971.
  • 1965 Russian Translation—The translator was <a href='%D0%90._%D0%93%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%3A%3A_A._Gromova'>А. Громова :: A. Gromova</a> as per <a href='https%3A%2F%2Ffantlab.ru%2Fwork3157'>Fantlab</a>, which also lists the year as 1965. Additional details are from <a href='https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fbook%2Fshow%2F32994754'>Goodreads</a>.