Andzia

The heroine of these peculiar, surprising poems written by Bishop Piotr Mańkowski (1866-1933) is a little girl named Andzia. Breaking the rules dictated by adults, Andzia gets pulled into a maelstrom of extraordinary events. Sometimes a poem ends with merely a harmless reprimand, but other times with dismemberment or a lifelong debt. However, each poem’s ending is more humorous than gruesome. And the lessons that can be learned from them is that while it is safer to listen to your elders, disobedient children have the most wonderful adventures.

The nine poems by Bishop Mańkowski were discovered in Rome in 2007. They were inspired by the work of Heinrich Hoffmann, author of books about ‘Shaggy Peter’ (original: Der Struwwelpeter), who suffered terrible consequences for his unruly behaviour. In Andzia, Mańkowski also polemicises with the moralising works of Stanisław Jachowicz, the most popular Polish fairy tale writer of the 19th century.

Although Mańkowski is not always stylistically perfect, his feel for language cannot be denied. The lively phrasing and regular rhymes make the poems easy to read and quick to memorise. The author’s ingenuity is impressive as he leads Andzia from completely mundane situations into the most surprising and absurd regions of experience.

The poems were illustrated by Przemysław ‘Trust’ Truściński, one of Poland’s most talented comic artists from the generation that debuted in the 1990s. In Trust’s visual interpretation, Andzia is a brave, determined child similar to Little Nemo from Winsor McCay’s famous comics. Just like McCay, Trust lets his imagination run wild – the illustrations sometimes become detached from the text and drift away towards a surreal sequence of associations. However, while Nemo grappled with the oneiric delusions of a child’s imagination, Andzia is surrounded by the delightful technological innovations of the interwar period – automobiles, transatlantic planes, radio transmitters and tanks.