Breakdown of Odniósłszy wielki sukces, pisarz napisał kolejne dzieło.
pisarz
writer
napisać
to write (perfective)
sukces
success
wielki
great (large, grand)
kolejny
next (in a sequence) / another / consecutive
odnieść
to achieve (success, victory)
dzieło
work (of art, creation)
Questions & Answers about Odniósłszy wielki sukces, pisarz napisał kolejne dzieło.
Why does odniósłszy end in -łszy rather than the usual -wszy?
To form this participle, you look at the masculine singular past tense of the perfective verb. If the letter before the final -ł is a vowel (like napisał), you drop the -ł and add -wszy to get napisawszy. But for odnieść, the past tense is odniósł. Because there is a consonant (s) before the -ł, you keep the -ł and add -szy, giving you odniósłszy.
How would this sentence look if I used po tym jak instead of the participle?
It would be: Po tym jak pisarz odniósł wielki sukces, napisał kolejne dzieło. The participle odniósłszy is simply a more elegant, literary way to compress that temporal clause.
Could I use odniósłszy if the success was achieved by the publisher, but the writer wrote the book?
No. A strict rule for all Polish adverbial participles is that the hidden subject of the participle must be the exact same as the subject of the main clause. Here, the pisarz must be both the one who achieved success and the one who wrote the next work.
I know osiągnąć means to achieve. Why use odnieść here?
While osiągnąć sukces is perfectly correct and common, odnieść sukces is a very strong, fixed collocation in Polish. You will hear both, but odniósłszy sukces sounds highly natural and fits the literary tone of the participle perfectly.
Does kolejne dzieło imply it is only their second work?
Kolejny means next or subsequent in a series. It does not restrict it to the second work; it just means the writer wrote a subsequent work following the successful one. If you wanted to emphasize a different work, you would use inne, and for simply one more, you could use jeszcze jedno.
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