Episode 162: This Poem!

How You Say?

To fraszka!

English Phonemes: “toh FRA[SZ]-kah”

Literal Translation: This poem.

Elegant Translation: This is a poem.

English Equivalent: It’s a snap.

A “fraszka” is a very specific type of poem. It’s a two-line poem where both lines rhyme and match rhythm almost perfectly. The purpose of it is to convey a witticism or a joke. A lot of people think this is easy, but it takes a real wit to come up with a good one.

Sometimes, you’ll see a longer poem like this, where you have two rhyming lines, then two more, and so on. But that’s more of a proper poem in the fraszka style. Kind of like a haiku is 5 7 5 and if you see a longer poem that harkens back to that shape, that’s fine, but it’s not technically a haiku.

Examples of this kind of poem include:

“Ulepił Pan Bóg figurę z błota,
tak przyszedł na świat pierwszy idota.”
by Lech Niekarz
Which means: “Lord God clumped a figure out of mud, that’s how the first idiot came to the world.”

Or

“Czasem się trafia taka parafia,
gdzie anioł z diabłem to jedna mafia!”
by Jan Bester
Which means: “Sometimes, you chance on a parish where angel and devil are all one mafia.”

Anyway, to say something is “to fraszka” is to say that it’s a snap. Easily done. This idiom can be said about any task that you think is simple. In this idiom, you don’t need a verb because the word “is” is implied.

Enjoy!

To = this, then [depending on context]
Fraszka = specific name for the 2-line rhyming poem [proper noun, fem. s. subj. form]

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