Trurl invents an electronic bard. Klaupacius challenges it:

  "Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!"

   Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
   She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
   Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
   Silently scheming,
   Sightlessly seeking
   Some savage, spectacular suicide.

If one wishes to see another excerpt indicating how amazing Lem was via Kandel, i posted one of my favorite poems of all time, also from the same short story here: http://blog.knowtheory.net/post/88490831/the-best-poem-ever-...

The poem has only one blemish, which is the assumption that "Euler" rhymes with "ruler".

Guy had a table with a wide range of second hand books mostly sci fi. I carefully picked over the pile and chose some of my favorite authors - some that were quite hard to get.

When I went to purchase about three books, the guy said "OK since you are obviously a man with taste in SF I'm gonna let you see my other 'special' stock" - and out came a small tray of books from under the table. Not previously on sale. Maybe it was just a clever marketing ploy - but this is how I found my first Stanislaw Lem book (which he recommended).

Since then I've always tried to buy Lem at SF second hand stores but actually very hard to come by (in English). I did buy a brand new copy of 'His Master's Voice' the other day and was not disappointed.

Don't think he actually wrote that many SF books - I think I have them all now but maybe I'm mistaken.

In my opinion, he wrote quite a lot of them -- almost 30 fiction books, half of them being novels, and other half collections of stories. Apart of that, he published over 20 non-fiction books, but they were rarely translated to English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Lem#Works

I last read Lem 15 years ago, when I was in high-school, but it had such a huge effect on me that this doodle gave me goose-bumps when it first started, I cannot explain exactly why.

I don't know about the quality of the original Polish, but ... some of his heavier works are well, heavy in the English version. I'm thinking of "Solaris", "His Master's Voice", "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". They are good books - but so are Dickens, Tolstoy etc. which require a bit of effort from the modern reader.

However the Cyberiad is an absolute pleasure to read. I read it when I was in my early teens and I ate it up - it challenged my mind, made me laugh and was very easy to read. Other lighter ones - "Tales of Pirx the Pilot", "The Futurological Congress", "A Perfect Vacuum" are easy to read too.

A case of bad translations. Those books are quite readable in the original language.

Thanks about the "heads up" with regard to the issues with some of the English translations. I'd been thinking I should revisit it, but these days an English language text would be far more accessible.

Update: Actually Solaris is not available either. I was misled because there is a Solaris 'Study Guide' available for Kindle.