Journal of sessions and acts of the Great Sejm (1788-1792)
translated into the language and realities of people born in the 21st century

About the Project

Since the time when the Great Sejm (Four-Year Sejm) passed the Constitution of May 3rd in 1791, so many years have elapsed that the language of those people has become incomprehensible to modern individuals. Therefore, it became necessary to translate the achievements of the Great Sejm into contemporary languages.

But this effort involved not only the translation of words but also the reinterpretation of their realities into modern contexts, often abbreviating lengthy speeches (to avoid the TL;DR syndrome), and updating names of offices and titles (which were already archaic in the 18th century).

As the great-great-great-great-grandson of Józef Radzicki, a deputy from Zakroczym and a member of the Legislative Commission of that Sejm (then called “Deputacja do Układania Konstytucji”), I felt obliged to these individuals to bring them out of obscurity and dust them off - to allow them to speak in a language understandable today. For instance, today’s head of state is not “His Most Serene Majesty, Our Gracious King,” but simply “President Andrzej Duda” or “Mr. President Joe Biden.”

The politicians active 235 years ago were modern and aspired to be modern. Restoring their modernity, therefore, is a way of giving them their due.

I executed the translation in the following steps:

1. I collected the protocols (printed or published) of all Sejm sessions, and where they were not available, contemporaneous reports published in the “Gazeta Warszawska.” There were 564 of them (one for each day of the sessions).
2. I converted all of this into text form using OCR.
3. I converted all the Sejm’s laws published in the “Volumina Legum” into text form – there were 491 of them.
4. I standardized everything into a common format by modernizing the spelling and grammar of the texts (using AI tools).
5. I identified all mentions of people in the text – both parliamentarians and others mentioned in both parliamentary discussions and official speeches, as well as in the enacted laws. Wherever possible, I included references to their genealogies (in the Great Genealogy of Minakowski, Wielcy.pl). There are about 34,000 such references (yes, thirty-four thousand!).
6. I updated the titles of individuals, so my ancestor is no longer “His Illustriousness Radzicki of Zakroczym,” but rather “Mr. Józef Radzicki, deputy from Zakroczym.” I did the same for senators and ministers, so instead of “His Excellency the Treasury Minister of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” it is “Mr. Adam Poniński, Deputy Minister of Finance for Lithuania-Belarus.”
7. Finally, I instructed the artificial intelligence model (GPT-4-1106-preview, 120k) with a command roughly as follows: “Imagine you are an early-year history or political science student at one of the top American universities, and you are reporting on the parliament sessions of the Poland-Ukraine Union with Lithuania-Belarus. Read these reports and describe them in your own words so that it is understandable to your peers; modify the realities to modern ones.”
8. In one more step, I directed the same model to generate a list of 5-10 main topics discussed each day and translated these topics into the major European languages (the languages of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as English, German, and French).

This is, of course, a simplification. There was much more work involved, and it was far more complex, but broadly speaking, this is what it looked like.

The journal is available in an open service in both Polish and English versions. The original version (scans and attempts at reading) is available after logging in (subscription to the Wielcy.pl database required).

If funding is found (about 100,000 PLN), it will be possible to hire people to carefully check the transcribed text (about 20 million characters) and then produce a much more thorough edition in a larger number of languages. Unfortunately, I do not have the funds for this, as I had to spend over 35,000 PLN on therapy for my daughter, whom I am raising alone, over the past year. Moreover, Polish public institutions operating in the grant system are not capable of undertaking such projects (both in terms of people and procedures).

In the future, it would be worthwhile to add materials that were not published but are in manuscripts in places like the Central Archives of Historical Records or the Czartoryski Library. But perhaps someone else will do that.

You can support me through a donation on PayPal. I also encourage you to subscribe to my services (The Great Genealogy and Nekrologia / Obituaries database).

Dr. Marek Jerzy Minakowski, Tarnów, January 2024