I'm in my old apartment, slowly cleaning and reading my books. The time finally came to abandon my library. Emotionally. To see how cheap and worthless most of these books actually were. I cleaned the small bookcase in the corner, the one with a little glass door. I got the idea of putting my erotic collection there. As if it were a secret to be protected. A little private thing in this private little flat. I want to print a nice little bookplate explicitly designed for my erotic collection.
But most of these books have so little value, so primitive, and so flatly translated into Polish. Or unfitting my taste. The whole collection is painfully reduced to very few volumes. Perhaps Motory, by Emil Zygadłowicz, a bible of my sensual youth. But for the rest? Some time ago, I threw the pitiful Polish translation of Hull's The Sheikh. Many hot moments were simply omitted, they did not even dare render them. Now I read a pitiful anonymous novel, Beatrycze in Polish translation, that I once bought in that store of mine offering books at reduced price. It is a kind of cheap and peevish, second-hand Sade. Well, I also have first-hand Sade, 100 days of Sodom and Juliette. But still I don't need any of those Polish translations, triumphantly published at the dawn of democracy, in the 1990s. I used to laugh at those books, and never truly managed to finish. Well, Juliette, perhaps, when I was in my late teens. I remember having read it at school, under my table. I'm planning to spend some 100 or 200 euro to get better books in France. Any Malek Chebel, at the very least. Or any western translation of Imam al-Suyuti. Or a nice edition of Tauk al-Hamama. I have both Polish translations of Nafzawi (yes, the book has been translated twice, yet to little avail). But I should read such things in the original. All this is just a shame, a shelf full of American Kamasutras with photos instead of drawings. How could I keep such things at home. Yet I wonder how I will get rid of these books. The times in Poland are such that I'm just shy to distribute them. A brave hop into the recycling bin, thus, and they are all gone. A symbol of those long Polish 1990s that are no more.
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