¡Fuego! (Fire!)

Fire! (“Pali sie!”) is a very popular poem in Poland. The author is Jan Brzechwa, who has also written a great number of children’s books that have been enjoyed (and still are) by various generations of readers. The poem is about firemen (before, books about firemen used to be published) and narrates a day in the life of these brave public servants, always willing to protect and help the rest of the citizens. However, this is not just any regular day, it is an especially complicated one!

Agnieszka Borucka-Foks created her project on Pali sie! in 1999 while studying at the Fine Arts Faculty of Warsaw. In 2001, shortly after graduating, she attended the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, where we met. There, she showed us a model of her work, and as we contemplated it, we were immediately possessed by the desire to publish it. Since then, we had been trying to find the best means to do so. Initially, we wanted to keep the Polish text and the Polish cries of “Fire!”; however, as we explain in the book, this was not possible. After thinking it over, we decided to translate it and transform it into a kind of romance, an appropriate genre for narrative poems that has been greatly popular in Spain since the 15th century: back then, fire had already been invented, but firemen wore armour and they hardly ever arrived on time.

Aside from being a book about firemen, it must be said that Fire! is also a book about fire in general, and about the way of shouting “Fire!” in various languages; also, about a fly. After reading this book, some children may want to become firefighters; others, may instead want to become graphic designers, Polish poets, erudite philologists, or publishers of strange books.