Bujać!
· 1w
For all the English speakers asking what does „Bujać!” mean.
tle;dr: I’ve stolen it from Julian Tuwim - poet who wrote „Do prostego człowieka” back in 1929 (sic!).
Translated by:...
I didn't really like this translation so I worked a bit with Claude to produce a better one. Here it is along with some notes on the hardest translation challenges.
Fun Fact: Clause claims that the closing line, "Bujać — to my, panowie szlachta!" — is the single hardest line in the poem 😂
# To the Common Man
Julian Tuwim (1929) (translated from the Polish)
When once again, with paste still wet,
they slap new notices on the wall,
when "TO THE PEOPLE," "TO THE TROOPS"
sound the alarm in stark black type,
and any oaf, any green pup,
falls for that same old ancient lie —
that one must march and fire the guns,
must murder, plunder, poison, burn;
when they set out, by a thousand means,
to drag the homeland through every case,
to dazzle you with a painted crest,
to goad you on with "history's claim" —
with talk of borders, glory, soil,
of fathers, grandfathers, and flags,
of heroes — and of victims too;
when out step bishop, pastor, rabbi
to bless the rifle in your hands,
because the Lord himself, from heaven,
has whispered: for the homeland — fight;
when the front-page headlines start to shriek
and turn rank and coarse, like rotting meat,
and a herd of frenzied women starts
pelting the "soldier-boys" with flowers —
— O my unlettered friend,
my fellow man, from here or anywhere!
Know this: it's kings and bloated lords
who ring the bells of dread for you;
know that it's humbug, a common con,
when they cry out to you: "Shoulder arms!" —
that somewhere oil has gushed for them
and brought them in a crop of dollars;
that something in their books won't square,
that somewhere they've sniffed out full vaults,
or greasy crooks have set their eyes
on some fatter tariff on cotton.
So smash your rifle on the cobblestones!
The blood is yours — the oil is theirs!
And shout it out from town to town,
defending what your own blood earned:
"Lying — that's *our* trade, my lords!"
---
# A few notes on the hardest spots
"Ojczyznę szarpać deklinacją" (lit. "to tear/wrench the Fatherland through declension") — Tuwim is mocking propagandists who drag the word *Ojczyzna* (Fatherland) through every Polish grammatical case in speech after speech. English has no equivalent grammatical pun, so "drag the homeland through every case" keeps the legal/bureaucratic flavor of "case" as a faint echo, but the joke about *declension* specifically is untranslatable.
"Kiedy rozścierwi się, rozchami" — these are near-nonce words Tuwim coined from *ścierwo* (carrion/carcass) and *cham* (boor), describing the press's screaming headlines as something that rots and coarsens. I rendered it as "turn rank and coarse, like rotting meat" to keep the carrion image, though the deliberate ugliness of the invented Polish verbs themselves can't really be replicated.
"krwawica" — an old/dialect word for property or earnings gained through blood and sweat; it's not "blood money" (ill-gotten) but the opposite — what you've honestly bled for. "What your own blood earned" tries to hold both the literal and figurative sense together.
The closing line, "Bujać — to my, panowie szlachta!" — this is the single hardest line in the poem. *Panowie szlachta* (roughly "you noble lords/gentry") is an old, half-ironic form of address; *bujać* means to bluff, fib, or run a con. The line plays on an old self-mocking szlachta boast about their own swagger and bluffing — and Tuwim has the common man fling it back at the rulers as an accusation: *deceiving people is your specialty, not mine*. "Lying — that's our trade, my lords!" keeps the sarcastic borrowed voice, but the historical resonance of the phrase for a Polish reader (and the slight ambiguity of who "our" refers to) doesn't fully survive translation.
Form — the original is a single unbroken 40-line stretch in regular nine-syllable lines with alternating exact rhymes, built to sound like a speech or proclamation. I broke it into stanzas for English readability and didn't force a rhyme scheme, since chasing rhyme in English on top of this much dense, idiomatic content would have meant sacrificing accuracy — I prioritized the meaning, the register (deliberately crude and colloquial — "lout," "humbug," "con," "crooks"), and the forward-driving, indignant rhythm instead.
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