My grade is in: A. I would have been happy with anything B or better, and to be honest, a grade in the B to A- range would probably be a more accurate representation of my achievement. According to our grading standard, A is supposed to represent “outstanding” performance, which, again, to be honest, I rarely aspire to anymore because, in my heart, I know myself to be somewhat lazy, troche leniwy, or, at the very least, leisurely. Stand out performance should be a pinnacle of industry and genius, a form of overachievement, but I know I can work harder and do better. I excuse and remind myself that Polish is a difficult language—even for the native Russian speaker in our class.
I have learned a great deal and even begun to forget some of what I’ve learned and memorized, but I’m registered for second semester Polish and will continue on my journey. Among the lessons, primary is that language study reveals our common humanity, our shared Chomskyan apparatus for communicating the world, as well as language’s tacit influence on our apprehending and interpreting it. (We don’t quite live in a prison-house of language, or if we do, it’s an unusually expansive and minimally secured institution. Or, linguistically, we are more or less out on probation.) Even as I wonder why Polish speakers would solve a language problem their way instead of how we do it in English, I can comprehend how they solve that problem and even appreciate its occasionally superior elegance. So that each language is like a kaleidoscope: it fractures the world differently, diffracting and refracting, sometimes bizarrely complexly, though never quite unrecognizably, renders it askew, aslant, like Picasso’s portrait of Ambrose Vollard. A foreign language is at the same time both foreign and language, the latter of which is evolutionarily deeply familiar.
The differences—arbitrary, unique, and frustrating initially to language learners—become, at last, distinctive and charming. For example, in Polish there are no definite or indefinite articles, no “the,” no “a.” So ubiquitous in our everyday speaking, we think we can’t do without them in English, and we don’t, but we could, maybe. In many Slavic languages, like Polish, “The definiteness and indefiniteness of a noun is determined by context” (Swan, 5). That is to say, definiteness and indefiniteness of noun is determined by context. Not much difference, really, in sense, but the absence of articles affects the sound and cadence of an expression, which makes the familiar strange and sometimes funny owing to its strangeness. In a sweet little romantic comedy, Big Trouble, for example, some lightweight Russian mobsters deal bombs and small arms out of a “bar” in Miami, Florida, and give utterance to gems of misspokenness: “We sponsor girls’ softball team,” “maybe I have item for you,” “How can I help FBI?” and when accused of dealing thermonuclear weaponry, rejoin, “Is bar,” then “I want lawyer.” With their amusingly rolled r, the effect delights, though, remembering that Russian has no present tense form of “to be,” the “Is bar” line may represent an instance of comic linguistic license.
Three weeks until Beginning Polish II. Some opportunity to explore the language and culture outside the covers of our text.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Useful Expressions
So, as I’ve been studying for my final in first-semester Polish, rehearsing my exercises in the “standard, literary” forms of the language, I confess to becoming a little bit bored—so much to memorize—and somewhat curious as to the relationship between what we are learning in class and lived life and the spoken word on the Polish streets and in the Polish fields. Hardly an original attitude at the end of the semester, but one I haven’t taken in many years. Turning away from my textbooks, I cracked the Kosciuszko Dictionary just for a change of pace, to find immediately on the inside cover Codzienne zwroty (“Useful expressions”), though we might also translate codzienne as “daily.” In either case, the list is truly, though darkly, comic.
Half, it seems, of the most useful, daily expressions in Poland are as follows: “Back off! You are under arrest! Get your hands off! Get down! Don’t touch me! Stand back! Stay down! Don’t move! Get away! Cut it out! Break it up! Let go of me! Hands up! Move it! Duck! You listen to me! Get lost! Get a doctor. Look out! Get an ambulance. Get out of here! Shut up! Stop that man! Pull over! Get out of the way! Leave me alone!” Except for that last one, I would hope never to use any of these, and in that one exceptional case, I would elide the exclamation point and add prosze, “please.” This list does not seem to be a holdover from the Communist Era; this edition was published in 2008. The rest of the list is not much more encouraging, though I have made use of Nie rozumiem (“I don’t understand”) already in class; and Zabladzilem (“I’m lost”) charms me. “Please,” “thank you,” (dziekuje) and “Where is the toilet” (Gdzie jest toaleta?) do not make the list. Very strange. As if they were less necessary for survival than “Duck!”
Usually, such black linguistic comedy results from the bad translation of menus, assembly instructions, directions, sales pitches, and speeches by Jimmy Carter—more often than not by do-it-yourselfers with one semester of foreign language under their belt. But this list is the work of among the most authoritative users of both languages. I surmise that the issue isn’t language or translation at all, but the mindset of lexicographers. Like me, they are quiet, word and book people, timid, and bruise easily. The streets and fields seethe danger and require almost constant warning and verbal aggression. The only daily, useful expression for our readerly world is “Shshsh.”
Half, it seems, of the most useful, daily expressions in Poland are as follows: “Back off! You are under arrest! Get your hands off! Get down! Don’t touch me! Stand back! Stay down! Don’t move! Get away! Cut it out! Break it up! Let go of me! Hands up! Move it! Duck! You listen to me! Get lost! Get a doctor. Look out! Get an ambulance. Get out of here! Shut up! Stop that man! Pull over! Get out of the way! Leave me alone!” Except for that last one, I would hope never to use any of these, and in that one exceptional case, I would elide the exclamation point and add prosze, “please.” This list does not seem to be a holdover from the Communist Era; this edition was published in 2008. The rest of the list is not much more encouraging, though I have made use of Nie rozumiem (“I don’t understand”) already in class; and Zabladzilem (“I’m lost”) charms me. “Please,” “thank you,” (dziekuje) and “Where is the toilet” (Gdzie jest toaleta?) do not make the list. Very strange. As if they were less necessary for survival than “Duck!”
Usually, such black linguistic comedy results from the bad translation of menus, assembly instructions, directions, sales pitches, and speeches by Jimmy Carter—more often than not by do-it-yourselfers with one semester of foreign language under their belt. But this list is the work of among the most authoritative users of both languages. I surmise that the issue isn’t language or translation at all, but the mindset of lexicographers. Like me, they are quiet, word and book people, timid, and bruise easily. The streets and fields seethe danger and require almost constant warning and verbal aggression. The only daily, useful expression for our readerly world is “Shshsh.”
Friday, December 17, 2010
Magnificent Mazowsze
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about dancing must be…. left ultimately to the logicians. I myself don’t dance, at least in public, committed as I am to the public good. And I don’t attend much to dance as an art form, except when I find myself at a performance for any number of reasons having nothing to do with aesthetic preference. Usually, someone has persuaded or dragged me into accompaniment to some event, where I am usually pleasantly surprised at dance’s beauty or intelligence. Somehow I fail to remember this delight and grumble in reluctant attendance upon the next event.
Recently, and for the purely intellectual reason of cultural research, I attended Mazowsze, “The State Song and Dance Ensemble of Poland”—The Magnificent, self-styled. They were celebrating their 60th anniversary with a holiday extravaganza, “Christmas Time in Poland,” and magnificent and extravagant it was, in spite of a curious, not uncomical, and slightly overlong play to the American audience’s folk culture: renditions of “Old MacDonald,” “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain,” et al., in slavically accented Amerykansku.
The program covered all the national dance forms: oberek, kujawiak, krakowiak, mazurka, and polonaise. The polka, I learn, though it would seem the most Polish of dances (polka can actually mean “Polish woman”), in fact, originated elsewhere and is commonly danced among the wider central European cultures. Each of the native Polish dances has a different regional origin and a different time/tempo, among many other historical details I won’t go into because I do not know them. Suffice it to say that they were at points fluid and graceful, athletic and acrobatic; the stylized kinetic evolutions were always precise and sometimes startling in their use of garlands, walking staffs, and long-handled hatchets. But Mazowsze never accelerated into that inauthentic, feverish tappy virtuosity of Riverdance. And the shirts stayed thankfully on.
The most notable feature of the dancing, the most spectacularly visible, was the costume, the color, which seemed to change for every dance and sometimes even during. Every garment gathered and displayed brightness and particolor. One doesn’t normally associate neon lavender with military uniform, but it has its place on the dance floor apparently. Peacock cockades. Intricate needlework. Ottoman influences. No severity, no austerity. Dance as fantastic kaleidoscope. Atwirl, the women’s long skirts opened like Tiffany lampshades.
Atwirl, the women’s long skirts opened like Tiffany lampshades. Dance, if I understand anything about it, expresses sublimated sexuality. The eroticism of Polish dance is little like the eroticism of say, African dance, or flamenco, or salsa, but erotic subtlety, restraint, has a power all its own. Underneath the billowing skirts and petticoats, slender legs descended in tight, white hosiery to ankle-high red boots, surprisingly high-heeled, or to black boots with red laces. Sigh. A dance-impaired fellow could fall sublimely in love with Mazowsze.
Recently, and for the purely intellectual reason of cultural research, I attended Mazowsze, “The State Song and Dance Ensemble of Poland”—The Magnificent, self-styled. They were celebrating their 60th anniversary with a holiday extravaganza, “Christmas Time in Poland,” and magnificent and extravagant it was, in spite of a curious, not uncomical, and slightly overlong play to the American audience’s folk culture: renditions of “Old MacDonald,” “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain,” et al., in slavically accented Amerykansku.
The program covered all the national dance forms: oberek, kujawiak, krakowiak, mazurka, and polonaise. The polka, I learn, though it would seem the most Polish of dances (polka can actually mean “Polish woman”), in fact, originated elsewhere and is commonly danced among the wider central European cultures. Each of the native Polish dances has a different regional origin and a different time/tempo, among many other historical details I won’t go into because I do not know them. Suffice it to say that they were at points fluid and graceful, athletic and acrobatic; the stylized kinetic evolutions were always precise and sometimes startling in their use of garlands, walking staffs, and long-handled hatchets. But Mazowsze never accelerated into that inauthentic, feverish tappy virtuosity of Riverdance. And the shirts stayed thankfully on.
The most notable feature of the dancing, the most spectacularly visible, was the costume, the color, which seemed to change for every dance and sometimes even during. Every garment gathered and displayed brightness and particolor. One doesn’t normally associate neon lavender with military uniform, but it has its place on the dance floor apparently. Peacock cockades. Intricate needlework. Ottoman influences. No severity, no austerity. Dance as fantastic kaleidoscope. Atwirl, the women’s long skirts opened like Tiffany lampshades.
Atwirl, the women’s long skirts opened like Tiffany lampshades. Dance, if I understand anything about it, expresses sublimated sexuality. The eroticism of Polish dance is little like the eroticism of say, African dance, or flamenco, or salsa, but erotic subtlety, restraint, has a power all its own. Underneath the billowing skirts and petticoats, slender legs descended in tight, white hosiery to ankle-high red boots, surprisingly high-heeled, or to black boots with red laces. Sigh. A dance-impaired fellow could fall sublimely in love with Mazowsze.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
From Bad to Worse
We learned last week in Polish that gorszy means “worse.” An irregular formation of the adjective zly (“bad”), it mirrors the irregularity of English: “bad, worse, worst,” not “bad, badder, baddest”—except in limited colloquial contexts. The comparative/superlative sequence zly, gorszy, najgorszy remains otherwise unremarkable, except that gorszy is a nickname of mine, one whose newly revealed meaning comes as a bit of a surprise and a disappointment. I had thought better of myself, always an intellectual error for those with no shortage of self-esteem.
Gorszy, what I had previously thought of as a term of endearment, represents an intentional corruption of Josh, first Jorsh or Gorsch or Gorschen, diminutivized at last into the affectionate, Gorschie, or, in Polish, Gorszy. Other brothers’ names have been similarly nicked: (James) Julian to Noodles, Eric to Reerack, and Neil Joseph to NeeNeeJoj. One can easily imagine their word histories. But imagine finding, too, a word’s, a name’s, secret meaning, and finding in that meaning reproof, a reminder of inferiority.
Not a bad thing, actually. It calls to mind the wickedly funny little poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself.” We Poles, we humans, have a gift for self-deception regarding our own goodness. “If snakes had hands,” she writes, “they’d claim their hands were clean.” And if they had conscience and language, just like us. It is good for Polish to remind me that we have conscience and language and badness in our being—and worseness, at least in mine. I do take some consolation in the fact that my nickname fails of the superlative. Moderation in all things.
Gorszy, what I had previously thought of as a term of endearment, represents an intentional corruption of Josh, first Jorsh or Gorsch or Gorschen, diminutivized at last into the affectionate, Gorschie, or, in Polish, Gorszy. Other brothers’ names have been similarly nicked: (James) Julian to Noodles, Eric to Reerack, and Neil Joseph to NeeNeeJoj. One can easily imagine their word histories. But imagine finding, too, a word’s, a name’s, secret meaning, and finding in that meaning reproof, a reminder of inferiority.
Not a bad thing, actually. It calls to mind the wickedly funny little poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself.” We Poles, we humans, have a gift for self-deception regarding our own goodness. “If snakes had hands,” she writes, “they’d claim their hands were clean.” And if they had conscience and language, just like us. It is good for Polish to remind me that we have conscience and language and badness in our being—and worseness, at least in mine. I do take some consolation in the fact that my nickname fails of the superlative. Moderation in all things.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Son of the Pole
The semester winds down to a close after 30+ hours of classroom instruction. We have a few more scheduled class meetings, but the last will be a review, and the penultimate, a reduced session owing to our instructor’s being away in Hawaii, that hotbed of Slavic scholarship. He’s presenting a paper on Milosz. Those uninitiated to the demands of the Old School professoriate might be inclined to moan “tough gig,” but along the easy road to Honolulu, our instructor acquired a reading knowledge of every Slavic language and a mastery of Russian, which he also teaches at the university. So I don’t begrudge him a subtropical conference now and again.
Professor Polakiewicz is a Distinguished Teacher a number of times over, a Russian language and literature scholar—Chekhov—and the recipient of the Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. His surname means “son of the Pole,” so while not perhaps the Pole himself, the son of the Pole carries sufficient Polish cultural, and no little general academic, authority for me. Born in Kiev to the family of a Polish military officer in the Russian service, he acquired Polish as his first language, and he continues to think and dream in it, though he has been in the United States since his early adolescence and pursued Russian language and literature for professional reasons. His only shortcoming as an instructor is an almost autonomic and irresistible penchant for erudite digression in response to student queries whose primary purpose is to excite that very digression. I don’t complain because it leaves less time for me to reveal the slow operation of my oral/verbal comprehension and response faculties. Nor am I averse to random and occasional recommendations (Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevski’s The Possessed, though he thinks the latter title more accurately translated by The Devils) or the curious linguistic fact that presents itself in the process: in the Russian language, for example, there is no present tense form of the verb “to be.” Fascinating. As if the mere use of a noun attests self-evidently to the thing’s existence. In any case, I cannot blame any lack of progress in my language study on the instructor or his scholarly activity.
Beginning Polish has been a sure first step on what remains, no doubt, a long cognitive haul. But now, with a 300-word vocabulary (an estimated 3% of an educated Polish adult’s vocabulary) and the fundaments of grammar and syntax falling into place, I look forward to the future of my quest. Among the many things I’ve learned in these few months and by far the most important is that the Polish language—hard, complex, alternately perversely scrupulous and more or less arbitrary—is learnable; that mysterious as the whole phenomenon of language is, can be, languages themselves aren’t. They’re alive but finite, algebraic. They’re learned by their native speakers and can be learned by anyone. Polish is learnable, even as the vast majority of it remains to be learned.
Professor Polakiewicz is a Distinguished Teacher a number of times over, a Russian language and literature scholar—Chekhov—and the recipient of the Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. His surname means “son of the Pole,” so while not perhaps the Pole himself, the son of the Pole carries sufficient Polish cultural, and no little general academic, authority for me. Born in Kiev to the family of a Polish military officer in the Russian service, he acquired Polish as his first language, and he continues to think and dream in it, though he has been in the United States since his early adolescence and pursued Russian language and literature for professional reasons. His only shortcoming as an instructor is an almost autonomic and irresistible penchant for erudite digression in response to student queries whose primary purpose is to excite that very digression. I don’t complain because it leaves less time for me to reveal the slow operation of my oral/verbal comprehension and response faculties. Nor am I averse to random and occasional recommendations (Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevski’s The Possessed, though he thinks the latter title more accurately translated by The Devils) or the curious linguistic fact that presents itself in the process: in the Russian language, for example, there is no present tense form of the verb “to be.” Fascinating. As if the mere use of a noun attests self-evidently to the thing’s existence. In any case, I cannot blame any lack of progress in my language study on the instructor or his scholarly activity.
Beginning Polish has been a sure first step on what remains, no doubt, a long cognitive haul. But now, with a 300-word vocabulary (an estimated 3% of an educated Polish adult’s vocabulary) and the fundaments of grammar and syntax falling into place, I look forward to the future of my quest. Among the many things I’ve learned in these few months and by far the most important is that the Polish language—hard, complex, alternately perversely scrupulous and more or less arbitrary—is learnable; that mysterious as the whole phenomenon of language is, can be, languages themselves aren’t. They’re alive but finite, algebraic. They’re learned by their native speakers and can be learned by anyone. Polish is learnable, even as the vast majority of it remains to be learned.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Gorecki
Until the day he died, this past November 12th, two days before my birthday, I had not heard, nor heard of, Henryk Gorecki. One of the latest words in Polish music, his most popular work, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, I’ve heard now, an amazingly apt gift from someone who doesn’t know me that well, and yet …. Anyway, as someone familiar with grief, I was struck by the perfection of the title before having heard a note, or the sense of the title, because the title itself, the words, display an alliteration all too pop—minimalist classical music is anything but pop. But then, this title is a translation, and the sound is different, of course, in Polish, even if the sense is much the same, Symfonia piesni zalwosych. The sibilance is more textured, more zh than s, embedded and unstressed: symFONya PYESHni zhaVAsich.
The first movement: the slow, sway of the double bass chanting down a dim monastic arcade at twilight. The second: the soaring lament of a girl imprisoned by the Gestapo. The third: the sopranic lullaby of a mother for her son killed in war, the rocking, the rocking in a cradle of arms. As if she were trying to awaken him. Then the letting go.
Polish aesthetics feature sorrow, almost begin with it in 1580 with Jan Kochanowski’s Laments. Sorrow becomes Poland, almost swamps it in blood in the 20th century, but artists like Gorecki know better than to become their own or their country’s sorrow, exhibit a certain common sense in not succumbing to it. However large a part of life, however hammered the steel, woe is not the whole of it.
The first movement: the slow, sway of the double bass chanting down a dim monastic arcade at twilight. The second: the soaring lament of a girl imprisoned by the Gestapo. The third: the sopranic lullaby of a mother for her son killed in war, the rocking, the rocking in a cradle of arms. As if she were trying to awaken him. Then the letting go.
Polish aesthetics feature sorrow, almost begin with it in 1580 with Jan Kochanowski’s Laments. Sorrow becomes Poland, almost swamps it in blood in the 20th century, but artists like Gorecki know better than to become their own or their country’s sorrow, exhibit a certain common sense in not succumbing to it. However large a part of life, however hammered the steel, woe is not the whole of it.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Nocturnes
No one knows who said it first, but everyone who has something to say about it now has to reckon with its mischief: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” While I’ve never seen anyone dance about architecture—and by “about” I mean “on the subject of” and not “in the vicinity of,” which I have seen—dancing about architecture seems conceptually doable; it may even have been done. Like a dog walking on its hind legs, however, such dancing might not be done well. But writing about music, though distinct languages, we do with considerable frequency and no little success. Whole industries depend upon verbal discussion of the art, music and music publishing and criticism. So, if the simile was first uttered by a musician to another musician to acknowledge some fundamentally elusive incommunicability of music by means other than music or to discourage that musician from writing anything other than more music, fair enough. But otherwise, it’s just silly.
Along with a culture’s words, one must become fluent with a culture’s music, its melody, its song, and its dance—on or about its architecture. The first word in the Polish musical tradition is Chopin. The Arthur Rubinstein Collection of Chopin arrived at the same time as the Kosciuszko Dictionary, so in one fell swoop, I’ve acquired most of the words and much the best of Poland’s music, about eleven hours worth, and begun listening in earnest.
Chopin’s Nocturnes (Op. 9, 15, 27, 32) ripple and run like the waters of a dream, a sad dream sadly, but a languid, liquid dreamy one no less. Trills and flourishes, for which the human hand would seem to have an insufficient number of fingers, bubble up and away with astonishing, even appalling virtuosity to a person who has tried to play the piano. The required touch of many opening and closing notes is so lilting delicate that you wonder how Chopin/Rubinstein can make a sound at all, as if both the note and its not being played were being played. The sadness of remembered childhood, of home, the sweetness and bitter sweetness, drips off the line, note by note, sometimes, drop by precious, hesitant drop, as if to sigh “Life has been all right, remember, dear? And it may be all right again.” This is as Polish as sound gets, and as human. I’ve ten more hours attend to.
Along with a culture’s words, one must become fluent with a culture’s music, its melody, its song, and its dance—on or about its architecture. The first word in the Polish musical tradition is Chopin. The Arthur Rubinstein Collection of Chopin arrived at the same time as the Kosciuszko Dictionary, so in one fell swoop, I’ve acquired most of the words and much the best of Poland’s music, about eleven hours worth, and begun listening in earnest.
Chopin’s Nocturnes (Op. 9, 15, 27, 32) ripple and run like the waters of a dream, a sad dream sadly, but a languid, liquid dreamy one no less. Trills and flourishes, for which the human hand would seem to have an insufficient number of fingers, bubble up and away with astonishing, even appalling virtuosity to a person who has tried to play the piano. The required touch of many opening and closing notes is so lilting delicate that you wonder how Chopin/Rubinstein can make a sound at all, as if both the note and its not being played were being played. The sadness of remembered childhood, of home, the sweetness and bitter sweetness, drips off the line, note by note, sometimes, drop by precious, hesitant drop, as if to sigh “Life has been all right, remember, dear? And it may be all right again.” This is as Polish as sound gets, and as human. I’ve ten more hours attend to.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
The Words, the Words
It is well and famously written that in the beginning was the Word, and for the Slavs, that would seem literally true. The origin of their identification, according to P.M. Barford in The Early Slavs, has a comparably scriptural resonance, though less well written:
"From the thirteenth century the short form, ‘Slav’ was taken as the original root (and derived from the word *Slava—honour, glory or fame), but as early as the fourteenth century the longer form ‘Slovenia’ was used to propose the origin with the word *Slovo (word, speech). It is interesting to compare this with the Slavs’ term for their German neighbours, *Nemcy (the dumb or mute). According to this model the Slavs would have called themselves the Slovani—that is the speaking ones (those who know the words) while they called some of their neighbors the dumb ones (those who do not know the words.)" (p. 29)
Barford, of course, a scholar, would prefer this rhetorical derivation; men of action, honor, glory, fame—warriors—might disagree, but they settle their disputes in other ways and are probably not even aware that words have won out over deeds here. That the word Slav would become the base root of the English word “slave” we will leave for another time, along with the richly ironic possibility of one’s becoming a slave to words.
In any case, the words arrived this week, The New Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary, a handbook of 301 Polish Verbs, and a Dictionary of Polish Obscenities. Originally, I had made inquiries into obtaining the great Stanislawski dictionary, but decided, in part, owing to impatience, that the Kosciuszko, at 140,000 entries, provided ample heft for a beginner. A five-pound, rust-red brick of a book, it exudes that new book smell, and I sniff along its gutter, inhaling the authority of fresh reference paper. Why 301 verbs and not merely 300, I do not know, but I suppose when you get to #300, zenic sie (“to marry”—what a way to end a book!) and you don’t yet have zyc (“to live, experience”), well, you need just one more—so much for round numbers. As for the lexicon of vulgarities, I expect to employ it as I falter in the acquisition of my grandmother tongue. I remember her calling me a little dupa.
"From the thirteenth century the short form, ‘Slav’ was taken as the original root (and derived from the word *Slava—honour, glory or fame), but as early as the fourteenth century the longer form ‘Slovenia’ was used to propose the origin with the word *Slovo (word, speech). It is interesting to compare this with the Slavs’ term for their German neighbours, *Nemcy (the dumb or mute). According to this model the Slavs would have called themselves the Slovani—that is the speaking ones (those who know the words) while they called some of their neighbors the dumb ones (those who do not know the words.)" (p. 29)
Barford, of course, a scholar, would prefer this rhetorical derivation; men of action, honor, glory, fame—warriors—might disagree, but they settle their disputes in other ways and are probably not even aware that words have won out over deeds here. That the word Slav would become the base root of the English word “slave” we will leave for another time, along with the richly ironic possibility of one’s becoming a slave to words.
In any case, the words arrived this week, The New Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary, a handbook of 301 Polish Verbs, and a Dictionary of Polish Obscenities. Originally, I had made inquiries into obtaining the great Stanislawski dictionary, but decided, in part, owing to impatience, that the Kosciuszko, at 140,000 entries, provided ample heft for a beginner. A five-pound, rust-red brick of a book, it exudes that new book smell, and I sniff along its gutter, inhaling the authority of fresh reference paper. Why 301 verbs and not merely 300, I do not know, but I suppose when you get to #300, zenic sie (“to marry”—what a way to end a book!) and you don’t yet have zyc (“to live, experience”), well, you need just one more—so much for round numbers. As for the lexicon of vulgarities, I expect to employ it as I falter in the acquisition of my grandmother tongue. I remember her calling me a little dupa.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Of Days and Months
We haven’t learned to count yet, but last week, among other things, we learned the days of the week: poniedzielek (Monday), wtorek (T), sroda (W), czwartek (Th), piatek (F), sobota (Sat), and niedziela (Sun). How a culture names its days, keeps its time, is a subject of no little curiosity and even some poetry. The Slavs, including the Poles, begin their week on Monday, not on Sunday, and their calendars run Monday to Sunday, not Sunday to Saturday. The names of their days are, for the most part, prosaically ordinal. Czwartek and piatek translate almost literally as “fourth” and “fifth”; wtorek derives from an archaic word for “two” or “second”; sroda comes from another word, srodek, which means “middle” or “center,” so that that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday read more or less literally as 2nd day, middle of the week, 4th day, and 5th day. In sobota we can rather easily see “Sabbath.” Sunday and Monday hold slightly more etymological interest for me and raise a question. Sunday, niedziela, derives from nie (“no”) and dziala (“activity, work”), that is, “the day of no work,” as in the biblical injunction that on the seventh day ye shall rest. Monday adds the syllable po, which means “after.” Monday then is “the day after the day of no work.” Which raises the question: why do Slavs begin the week by looking back to a previous day, the previous week? The first day of the week references something prior to the first. Why not look ahead?
English and German day names, referring as they do to Norse gods, Mani, Tiw, Wodin, Thor, Frige, and the Roman god Saturn, pack considerably more myth, mystery, and thunder in their week, but the situation reverses completely when we consider the names of the months—which we haven’t gotten to yet in Beginning Polish, but adventurous students sometimes go off on their own. Consider our September, October, November, December, the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month in the old Roman calendar, now recalibrated as our 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th month. (Good thing nobody knows Latin anymore, how confusing.) And now hear the Polish: wrzesien (the month of heather), padziernik (the month of broken flax), listopad (the month of the fallen leaves), and grudzien (the month of the frozen, clotted earth). Poetry here. I resolve to pass my weeks under the gods, and my months among the Poles.
English and German day names, referring as they do to Norse gods, Mani, Tiw, Wodin, Thor, Frige, and the Roman god Saturn, pack considerably more myth, mystery, and thunder in their week, but the situation reverses completely when we consider the names of the months—which we haven’t gotten to yet in Beginning Polish, but adventurous students sometimes go off on their own. Consider our September, October, November, December, the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month in the old Roman calendar, now recalibrated as our 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th month. (Good thing nobody knows Latin anymore, how confusing.) And now hear the Polish: wrzesien (the month of heather), padziernik (the month of broken flax), listopad (the month of the fallen leaves), and grudzien (the month of the frozen, clotted earth). Poetry here. I resolve to pass my weeks under the gods, and my months among the Poles.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Zupa
Sunday last I attended the Polish Soup Festival at Holy Cross Church in North Minneapolis. A flier announcing it had circulated in class two weeks prior. Not the most social of beings, no gourmand, and hardly a proponent of extracurricular learning, I passed the flier along, but with a nascent ambivalence because, on the other hand, I do love soup. It’s one of those perfect foods like bread, tea, cheese, and chocolate. One could survive on it alone—and bread—if you had to. I remember eating soup in Poland, chicken and mushroom, familiar yet with a foreign savor, good, original fare, differently spiced, not Campbell’s or Lipton’s. And so, on Sunday evening (w niedziele wieczorem) I found myself descending the steps into a church basement at just about the same time I remembered not having been to confession in over thirty years.
A Polish Catholic church basement, however, is not unlike any other church basement I’ve been in, mostly linoleum, cinderblock, and busy old ladies, a little on the crinkly side, like Dr. Ruth, only very Catholic. Heavens, they’re Catholic, and not just used-to-be, lapsed, but still culturally Catholic, like me. Ahead to the left, a soup queue, no Nazis. Below the dozen or so hand-lettered signs identifying soup entrees stood our servers attired in festive ethnic costume, including red, four-cornered hats with peacock feathers, and armed with ladles. A blue one without the feather, like the one topping Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba, I could don on occasion. Plastic spoon, plastic bowl, zupa.
The chicken noodle, not as pellucid as my grandmother’s—or the bowl I had in Torun on my first trip to Poland—had the effect of recalling her superior efforts, though she would sometimes forego the kluski noodles for store-bought. She also (or was it my mother?) added whole peppercorns to the broth which would ignite under our young, unwitting molars like firecrackers. Until we learned better. Memorable. I passed on the barscz, red beet soup, hot or cold. Never fancied barscz generally. It smells of earth, and not merely earth, but actual soil, and there are reasons we don’t eat dirt. And certainly it is not made tempting by a dollop of sour cream. I’ve never understood the notion of sour cream. If something’s soured, spoiled, you throw it out. Dirt and spoiled milk, Mmmmm. (Mniam in Polish.) I don’t think so. The mushroom with added chive, the vinegary Highlander, the carrot and dill, the lima bean and cabbage, the vegetable, the tomato and rice—all performed their gustatory functions with aplomb but without the magic of transport to Old World Poland. The potato soup, unfortunately, tasted of scorched pan, aluminum, a Silesian ore. The biggest and most pleasant surprise was the hunter soup, a sauerkraut stew called bigos, hearty and flavorful and meaty, whose recipe I’ve acquired and considered adding to my repertoire.
Other men do not live by soup alone, and the entertainment that evening consisted of appeals, some in Polish, for signatures on a petition to the bishop for preserving Holy Cross as a Polish parish. Hard economic times for the Catholic Church have led to mergers and consolidations and threatened the erasure of nationally identified congregations. A younger man, who seemed to be a relatively recent immigrant, though with satisfactory English, pressed me for a signature. Not a member of the parish, I demurred. “But you are Catholic?” he wished to remind me. If by Catholic he meant a long unshriven apostate, then, perhaps, but I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion. It was a long story. Wanting to help the earnest young man, my soupmate offered, “But you’re Polish.” Half-Polish, becoming Polish. I really didn’t want to weigh in on a matter I’d given no thought to. And I’m still enough of a Catholic to suspect that even if my signature might fool the bishop, it wouldn’t fool his Bog. I just came for the soup.
A Polish Catholic church basement, however, is not unlike any other church basement I’ve been in, mostly linoleum, cinderblock, and busy old ladies, a little on the crinkly side, like Dr. Ruth, only very Catholic. Heavens, they’re Catholic, and not just used-to-be, lapsed, but still culturally Catholic, like me. Ahead to the left, a soup queue, no Nazis. Below the dozen or so hand-lettered signs identifying soup entrees stood our servers attired in festive ethnic costume, including red, four-cornered hats with peacock feathers, and armed with ladles. A blue one without the feather, like the one topping Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba, I could don on occasion. Plastic spoon, plastic bowl, zupa.
The chicken noodle, not as pellucid as my grandmother’s—or the bowl I had in Torun on my first trip to Poland—had the effect of recalling her superior efforts, though she would sometimes forego the kluski noodles for store-bought. She also (or was it my mother?) added whole peppercorns to the broth which would ignite under our young, unwitting molars like firecrackers. Until we learned better. Memorable. I passed on the barscz, red beet soup, hot or cold. Never fancied barscz generally. It smells of earth, and not merely earth, but actual soil, and there are reasons we don’t eat dirt. And certainly it is not made tempting by a dollop of sour cream. I’ve never understood the notion of sour cream. If something’s soured, spoiled, you throw it out. Dirt and spoiled milk, Mmmmm. (Mniam in Polish.) I don’t think so. The mushroom with added chive, the vinegary Highlander, the carrot and dill, the lima bean and cabbage, the vegetable, the tomato and rice—all performed their gustatory functions with aplomb but without the magic of transport to Old World Poland. The potato soup, unfortunately, tasted of scorched pan, aluminum, a Silesian ore. The biggest and most pleasant surprise was the hunter soup, a sauerkraut stew called bigos, hearty and flavorful and meaty, whose recipe I’ve acquired and considered adding to my repertoire.
Other men do not live by soup alone, and the entertainment that evening consisted of appeals, some in Polish, for signatures on a petition to the bishop for preserving Holy Cross as a Polish parish. Hard economic times for the Catholic Church have led to mergers and consolidations and threatened the erasure of nationally identified congregations. A younger man, who seemed to be a relatively recent immigrant, though with satisfactory English, pressed me for a signature. Not a member of the parish, I demurred. “But you are Catholic?” he wished to remind me. If by Catholic he meant a long unshriven apostate, then, perhaps, but I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion. It was a long story. Wanting to help the earnest young man, my soupmate offered, “But you’re Polish.” Half-Polish, becoming Polish. I really didn’t want to weigh in on a matter I’d given no thought to. And I’m still enough of a Catholic to suspect that even if my signature might fool the bishop, it wouldn’t fool his Bog. I just came for the soup.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Quiz 3: Exit Humbly
Last week’s quiz was a revelation in humility and a reminder that however much you think you know, or even know you know, you really don’t know that much, never much more than squat. A grades on previous quizzes and homework assignments had led me to imagine—falsely, prematurely—that one day I might actually get the hang of this language, that at some point in the not too distant future, I might actually hear, read, or speak an entire sentence with almost instantaneous and perfectly felicitous comprehension. A simple sentence, to be sure, with a single subordinate clause, perhaps, but……. But, no; one of the quiz questions, beginning with the instrumental form of “who,” Kim, completely disabused me of that fantasy. Kim who? was my immediate take on the opening phrase. Kim is not a Polish first name (Kim nie jest polskim imieniem.) Another question and another question would stump me at first, then permit me to gather the relevant words, then wait impatiently as I assembled a plausible response, double-checking the endings, correcting the obvious error or two, then moving uncertainly on. Leave it! My brain churned through them all, abandoning only one translation item completely untried. I was sorry and embarrassed that I could not engage, could not even begin to engage, that enigmatic line. A fifty-year-old Ph.D. is still a schoolboy.
As our instructor consoled us that our quizzes would only get more difficult as we amassed words and grammar rules and syntactical practices and knowledge of those damned endings, I wilted a bit, sighed. His twitting brought to mind a Monty Python sketch that summed up our challenge in its droll, off-hand, and premonitory way. Not the “Learning Italian” sketch, in which the instructor, an Englishman, clumsily models Italian to a roomful of native Italians, but rather the “Great Actors” sketch, in which Alan, the interviewer, fawningly inquires of Sir Edwin how many words he had to say as King Lear at the Aldwitch in 1952, as if acting were like weight-lifting.
"Sir Edwin: Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words... um... I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important. Old Peter Hall used to say to me, 'They're all there Eddie, now we've got to get them in the right order.' And, er, for example, you can also say one word louder than another--er, 'To *be* or not to be,' or 'To be *or* not to *be*,' or 'To be or not to *be*' you see? And so on.
Alan: Inflection."
Thank you, Alan. But in learning Polish, inflection would be called intonation; inflection, of course, has to do with the damn endings. All of which suggests, alas, that learning Polish is ultimately more difficult than becoming a great actor. Lots more words to learn, order to get them in, pitch to perfect, AND endings. Oh, yes, and it’s all, eventually, ad lib.
As our instructor consoled us that our quizzes would only get more difficult as we amassed words and grammar rules and syntactical practices and knowledge of those damned endings, I wilted a bit, sighed. His twitting brought to mind a Monty Python sketch that summed up our challenge in its droll, off-hand, and premonitory way. Not the “Learning Italian” sketch, in which the instructor, an Englishman, clumsily models Italian to a roomful of native Italians, but rather the “Great Actors” sketch, in which Alan, the interviewer, fawningly inquires of Sir Edwin how many words he had to say as King Lear at the Aldwitch in 1952, as if acting were like weight-lifting.
"Sir Edwin: Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words... um... I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important. Old Peter Hall used to say to me, 'They're all there Eddie, now we've got to get them in the right order.' And, er, for example, you can also say one word louder than another--er, 'To *be* or not to be,' or 'To be *or* not to *be*,' or 'To be or not to *be*' you see? And so on.
Alan: Inflection."
Thank you, Alan. But in learning Polish, inflection would be called intonation; inflection, of course, has to do with the damn endings. All of which suggests, alas, that learning Polish is ultimately more difficult than becoming a great actor. Lots more words to learn, order to get them in, pitch to perfect, AND endings. Oh, yes, and it’s all, eventually, ad lib.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Life in Other Words
I’ve decommissioned the comment option of this blog on the premise that the author ought to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and articulate feature of his own site. And so, I have excommunicated my lovelier commentariat for their lively and insightful violations of this second fundament of writing: narcissism. This stricture has the added value of keeping my attention focused on the evolutions of my own mind under the influence of Polish acculturation. Heaven knows I have had a hard enough time keeping up with the docile creatures that tentatively emerge from the warrens of my intellect and limited imagination (wyobraznia); following the young, nimble half-wild rabbits (kroliky) of suggestion released by others, and those rabbits bred for racing, would simply lead me to exhaustion.
But I will address the most recent comment/suggestion. In response to my penultimate post, in which I observed and lamented the time required for learning a language—learning anything seriously, I dare say—a veteran and accomplished educator, seconded by an uncommonly astute student, suggested that I should see my entire life, every waking hour, as an opportunity to improve my Polish. (Our instructor has additionally suggested we sleep with our books under our pillows.) While it may be the best way of studying a language short of immersing oneself entirely in the culture by moving to Poland, immersing one’s daily life in the words is certainly not an effective way to limit one’s time in acquiring mastery. Quite the opposite. The university recommends that for a 5-credit course like Beginning Polish, a student should expend at least 15 hours per week in study, which I believe I do—in class and in blocs of study throughout the week. Subtracting the 3.5 hours of class time, I should be devoting 11.5 hours of homework per week. Immersing my self in the words would easily absorb the remaining 67 hours of discretionary time: the rest of my life would be homework.
I ventured a little experiment last week after receiving this recommendation and tried, Adamlike in the Polish Garden of Eden, to note and name all of the nouns on my bike ride to work: drzewo (tree), more specifically jesion (ash), klon (maple), brzoza (birch: former cabinet secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski’s name derives from this word), ulica (street), autobus, samochod (car), skrzyzowacasie (crossing), swiatla regulujace ruch uliczny (traffic lights), and, of course, rower (bicycle). It took me awhile to look these up, write them down, and put them to memory. And I still don’t know exactly how to pronounce skrzyzowacasie. Then I thought about all the other nouns I would have to look up on my three-mile ride to work. And not all of them would be in my little $10 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary. Our syllabus recommends Stanislawski’s Wielki Slownik Angielsko-Polski (The Great English-Polish Dictionary), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo (publishing house) Philip Wilson, 1999. There is a 2-volume and a 4-volume edition, @ $180.00—200,000 word and phrase entries. So if, in addition to my normal 15 hours of study a week, I immersed my remaining 67 hours per week in Polish words at the optimistic rate of 25 words/entries per hour, I’d be through Stanislawski in two and a half years. Which returns me to my lament.
But I will address the most recent comment/suggestion. In response to my penultimate post, in which I observed and lamented the time required for learning a language—learning anything seriously, I dare say—a veteran and accomplished educator, seconded by an uncommonly astute student, suggested that I should see my entire life, every waking hour, as an opportunity to improve my Polish. (Our instructor has additionally suggested we sleep with our books under our pillows.) While it may be the best way of studying a language short of immersing oneself entirely in the culture by moving to Poland, immersing one’s daily life in the words is certainly not an effective way to limit one’s time in acquiring mastery. Quite the opposite. The university recommends that for a 5-credit course like Beginning Polish, a student should expend at least 15 hours per week in study, which I believe I do—in class and in blocs of study throughout the week. Subtracting the 3.5 hours of class time, I should be devoting 11.5 hours of homework per week. Immersing my self in the words would easily absorb the remaining 67 hours of discretionary time: the rest of my life would be homework.
I ventured a little experiment last week after receiving this recommendation and tried, Adamlike in the Polish Garden of Eden, to note and name all of the nouns on my bike ride to work: drzewo (tree), more specifically jesion (ash), klon (maple), brzoza (birch: former cabinet secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski’s name derives from this word), ulica (street), autobus, samochod (car), skrzyzowacasie (crossing), swiatla regulujace ruch uliczny (traffic lights), and, of course, rower (bicycle). It took me awhile to look these up, write them down, and put them to memory. And I still don’t know exactly how to pronounce skrzyzowacasie. Then I thought about all the other nouns I would have to look up on my three-mile ride to work. And not all of them would be in my little $10 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary. Our syllabus recommends Stanislawski’s Wielki Slownik Angielsko-Polski (The Great English-Polish Dictionary), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo (publishing house) Philip Wilson, 1999. There is a 2-volume and a 4-volume edition, @ $180.00—200,000 word and phrase entries. So if, in addition to my normal 15 hours of study a week, I immersed my remaining 67 hours per week in Polish words at the optimistic rate of 25 words/entries per hour, I’d be through Stanislawski in two and a half years. Which returns me to my lament.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Hearsay
A few days ago I ran into a former squash colleague of mine, Herr Doktor A_W_, a small-animal veterinarian and a German, now, happily expatriated. Neither of us having been active on the courts for a couple of years, he asked what I was up to. “Polish,” I said and provided a bit of background on this less strenuous pastime in response to his interrogation. A euroskeptic smile underlined his curiosity as he related his most recent experience with members of the Polish national persuasion. In the not too distant past, a veterinary colleague of his had arranged for a professional vet student exchange with some institution in Poland; and my countrymen-to-be, it seems, comported themselves with less than perfect civility. The good doctor recalled the group as a male-dominated, sexist pecking order whose primary objective was getting laid. We did not have time to suss the unsavory details, but in going our separate ways, he granted that they might not be representative of Polish society as a whole. Or they may well have been, just as they might represent patriarchy and western civilization generally, and quite possibly the veterinary profession. To my mind, a preoccupation with sex and the social order would seem as natural to Polish primates as to German and American primates, as well as to the smaller mammals that A_W_, V.M.D. would treat regularly.
I was more interested in his use of the word “hierarchy,” as if even in informal social settings in a completely different country, a clear, conscious regimentation applied in Polish groups. In demotic America, “hierarchy” is something of a dirty word, but I have noticed the concept and the word used much more comfortably in a Polish cultural context. The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote that “in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is mandatory.” Rank matters, even among peers. Poland’s most recent poet of Nobel stature, Wislawa Szymborska, we learn, falls visibly short of Milosz’s achievement, though she’s “very good.” Some are more equal than others. (I like her better, at least in translation.) In the life of the body and the body politic, a similar traditional attitude seems to persist. The spirit of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility, a class more or less exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, could well continue to stickle in Polish social life. The Church, the military, and the university, all visibly stratified orders, remain important social institutions. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Poles might favor “hierarchy,” though it might to Herr W_ that I, an American, acknowledge its attraction. Not averse to hierarchies myself, I prefer them loose and voluntary.
I was more interested in his use of the word “hierarchy,” as if even in informal social settings in a completely different country, a clear, conscious regimentation applied in Polish groups. In demotic America, “hierarchy” is something of a dirty word, but I have noticed the concept and the word used much more comfortably in a Polish cultural context. The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote that “in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is mandatory.” Rank matters, even among peers. Poland’s most recent poet of Nobel stature, Wislawa Szymborska, we learn, falls visibly short of Milosz’s achievement, though she’s “very good.” Some are more equal than others. (I like her better, at least in translation.) In the life of the body and the body politic, a similar traditional attitude seems to persist. The spirit of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility, a class more or less exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, could well continue to stickle in Polish social life. The Church, the military, and the university, all visibly stratified orders, remain important social institutions. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Poles might favor “hierarchy,” though it might to Herr W_ that I, an American, acknowledge its attraction. Not averse to hierarchies myself, I prefer them loose and voluntary.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Not So Keen A __________________ (fill in the blank)
The early quiz and homework returns indicate that I haven’t lost my knack for getting good grades. But after thirty years at university, I know the difference between getting good grades and actually learning the material. Not that I am not learning Polish. One cannot encounter so fresh and osmotic a subject and not absorb significant amounts at the outset, only that I’m all too aware of what I don’t know and should know after five weeks—and could know if I worked harder: hard and soft consonants, what exactly voicing and devoicing is, and the rules for devoicing. Our instructor provides explanations in a linguistic jargon not less difficult than Polish itself. These “rules” do not help me express. They seem descriptive, analytic, not the kind of formulae by which one naturally generates discourse. In first language acquisition, we more or less learn these rules practically by ear and use, then take grammar exams on them in eighth grade, exams which have little impact on the average person’s competency, thankfully. In second language learning, at least in the academy, such linguistic scaffolding remains primary to pedagogy. And so, one can earn As without necessarily feeling any intimations of fluency. In time, our instructor assures us, in time.
And it is time, time on task, drill time, practice time, listening time—time that accounts for whatever progress I have made so far and exhibited in quiz and homework. I have no gift, no genius for foreign languages; I grind. When I am called upon to recite in class, perhaps half of those times I have drawn, immediately, a complete blank, and made that embarrassing excursus to dithering lexical incompetence—the kind that characterized George W. Bush at a press conference. This brain infarct, initially cognitive, is not becoming; it engenders embarrassment, which further compounds the hesitation. Affect affects effect. Sometimes I emerge from that foggy thicket, the path spontaneously and inexplicably opened in my mind ex nihilo, like the universe; sometimes I simply guess and grope to success; sometimes the instructor graciously moves on to another student, who provides an answer I knew but simply could not produce. Professor Polakiewicz has wisely not attempted to coax right answers out of me. When I’m wrong, I seem to benefit somewhat from stewing in error, tamten not tento—which is not even a word, only a misguided construction. If there were time, I could learn Polish best by making every possible language mistake in the book, but I suspect that the possible mistakes are infinite and time, not.
And it is time, time on task, drill time, practice time, listening time—time that accounts for whatever progress I have made so far and exhibited in quiz and homework. I have no gift, no genius for foreign languages; I grind. When I am called upon to recite in class, perhaps half of those times I have drawn, immediately, a complete blank, and made that embarrassing excursus to dithering lexical incompetence—the kind that characterized George W. Bush at a press conference. This brain infarct, initially cognitive, is not becoming; it engenders embarrassment, which further compounds the hesitation. Affect affects effect. Sometimes I emerge from that foggy thicket, the path spontaneously and inexplicably opened in my mind ex nihilo, like the universe; sometimes I simply guess and grope to success; sometimes the instructor graciously moves on to another student, who provides an answer I knew but simply could not produce. Professor Polakiewicz has wisely not attempted to coax right answers out of me. When I’m wrong, I seem to benefit somewhat from stewing in error, tamten not tento—which is not even a word, only a misguided construction. If there were time, I could learn Polish best by making every possible language mistake in the book, but I suspect that the possible mistakes are infinite and time, not.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Student
The Polish word for “student” is student. If only the rest were that simple. As I noted in an earlier post, Polish is a heavily inflected language, which means that nouns take different endings depending on how they are used in a sentence, that is, according to their case. In the nominative case, let’s say, as the subject of a sentence, “That student seems a little bit old to be taking a first semester language class,” we’d use the Polish form student. When we wish to indicate possession, ownership, “The utter confusion of that student,” we’d use the genitive case, here the Polish form studenta. The dative case, indicating the recipient of an action (a.k.a. the indirect object), would appear in a Polish sentence as follows: “The generous instructor gave studentowi the benefit of the doubt.” In the accusative, where the noun serves as the direct object (the complement of a transitive verb), we find “the generous instructor passing the old studenta, though with some reservation.” (An observant reader will note that the genitive and the accusative forms of this word are the same. Hmm.) These four cases are generally recognized in English grammar, but only the genitive has a different form: student, student’s, student, student.
In Polish, there are three more cases: instrumental, locative, and vocative. The instrumental shows means or agency. That is, if a seasoned instructor corrected an older student’s (studenta) error by means of a younger student, that younger student, if male, would be referred to as studentem. (I have no idea whether such a sentence would be in any way idiomatic in Polish. Hard to make it so in English—this is purely hypothetical.) Then there’s the locative, which appears after prepositions of location: “in” the student, “on” the student, “about” the student, “next to” the student, and “after” the student would all render the student, in Polish, studentcie. Finally, if one were to invoke a student, in joy or despair, one would cry out, “Oh, studentcie!”
Thus, seven case forms to remember for any noun. Oh, and the case forms are different for feminine nouns: studentka, studentki, studentce, studentke, studentka, studentce, and studentko. And for plurals: studenci, studentow, studentom, studentow, studentami, studentach. Much to remember then, and quickly please, including grammar terms (transitive/intransitive) which an old English major has long since forgotten, along with many umbrellas, keys, anniversaries, birthdates, and the names of any number of schoolmates. [I do recall my children’s names: "Hey, Stefan (Stefanie), Hey, Zoe (Zosiu)! Love you."] Why must language be so complicated? Because life, which language reflects, tries to capture, is complicated, and if you think about it, even more so than language. Which is why we also have silence—baffled, stunned, complete silence—a reverent WTF! a kind of non-utterance, the perfect uneffing of the ineffable.
In Polish, there are three more cases: instrumental, locative, and vocative. The instrumental shows means or agency. That is, if a seasoned instructor corrected an older student’s (studenta) error by means of a younger student, that younger student, if male, would be referred to as studentem. (I have no idea whether such a sentence would be in any way idiomatic in Polish. Hard to make it so in English—this is purely hypothetical.) Then there’s the locative, which appears after prepositions of location: “in” the student, “on” the student, “about” the student, “next to” the student, and “after” the student would all render the student, in Polish, studentcie. Finally, if one were to invoke a student, in joy or despair, one would cry out, “Oh, studentcie!”
Thus, seven case forms to remember for any noun. Oh, and the case forms are different for feminine nouns: studentka, studentki, studentce, studentke, studentka, studentce, and studentko. And for plurals: studenci, studentow, studentom, studentow, studentami, studentach. Much to remember then, and quickly please, including grammar terms (transitive/intransitive) which an old English major has long since forgotten, along with many umbrellas, keys, anniversaries, birthdates, and the names of any number of schoolmates. [I do recall my children’s names: "Hey, Stefan (Stefanie), Hey, Zoe (Zosiu)! Love you."] Why must language be so complicated? Because life, which language reflects, tries to capture, is complicated, and if you think about it, even more so than language. Which is why we also have silence—baffled, stunned, complete silence—a reverent WTF! a kind of non-utterance, the perfect uneffing of the ineffable.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Pan Steve
More than one of my readers, that is to say, two of my readers (40% of my known readership) have expressed a preference for more postings and a lighter touch. I don’t take all readers seriously, but these two I do because one is beautiful and the other my oldest friend. Beauty and friendship are among the most serious of recommendations.
But at the same time, one has to be true to oneself and to the subject of one’s blog, in this case, Polishness. As Professor Polakiewicz has reminded us on more than one occasion in only three classes to date, the Poles are an exceedingly “polite” people. The language, like many languages, has two forms of the singular pronoun “you,” a formal you-form and a familiar you-form. In Polish, the formal you form, pan (masculine) and pani (feminine), would seem to dominate social discourse. Our instructor’s mother, for example, and her best friend of many decades, who love one another like sisters, still address one another as pani.
A small thing, you might think, but this social practice has wider implications. It suggests that Poles exhibit reserve, circumspection, formalities. No one would mistake Polish culture for Mediterranean, Caribbean, or Oceanic. It is not, at least immediately, warm. Neither is it cold, but emanates rather a decorous lukewarmth. Poles are Old School, or at least, Polakiewicz is Old School. Even after many years teaching in this country, he wears a jacket and tie. Though jacketless, I’m in the habit of wearing a button-down Oxford and cravat, a habit deriving, perhaps, from some residual ethno-genetic or epigenetic aversion to the public casual. Never a T- or polo shirt at work for me. So that the freedom and informality that normally and rightfully characterizes a typical blog might not quite fit this one. Or perhaps, this social distance and seriousness are historical, generational accidents. I suppose we’ll see. Panie Stefanie, I’ll keep you posted.
But at the same time, one has to be true to oneself and to the subject of one’s blog, in this case, Polishness. As Professor Polakiewicz has reminded us on more than one occasion in only three classes to date, the Poles are an exceedingly “polite” people. The language, like many languages, has two forms of the singular pronoun “you,” a formal you-form and a familiar you-form. In Polish, the formal you form, pan (masculine) and pani (feminine), would seem to dominate social discourse. Our instructor’s mother, for example, and her best friend of many decades, who love one another like sisters, still address one another as pani.
A small thing, you might think, but this social practice has wider implications. It suggests that Poles exhibit reserve, circumspection, formalities. No one would mistake Polish culture for Mediterranean, Caribbean, or Oceanic. It is not, at least immediately, warm. Neither is it cold, but emanates rather a decorous lukewarmth. Poles are Old School, or at least, Polakiewicz is Old School. Even after many years teaching in this country, he wears a jacket and tie. Though jacketless, I’m in the habit of wearing a button-down Oxford and cravat, a habit deriving, perhaps, from some residual ethno-genetic or epigenetic aversion to the public casual. Never a T- or polo shirt at work for me. So that the freedom and informality that normally and rightfully characterizes a typical blog might not quite fit this one. Or perhaps, this social distance and seriousness are historical, generational accidents. I suppose we’ll see. Panie Stefanie, I’ll keep you posted.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
First Class
I took my seat in class as a student for the first time in twenty years: Beginning Polish. And so it has begun, in earnest. Not the oldest of his classmates, BorOvich, Josh (spelled phonetically Dzos in Polish) entered and sited himself in the second row, extreme right, by the door. I felt neither trepidation nor comfort, and the natural excitement of learning only came with time, as the instructor divulged tidbits about the Slavic language family. Russian is the most musical, owing to its separating all consonantal sounds with vowels; words never grind to an unpronounceable (or visual) halt against the twisted wire of barbarous consonant clusters like chrz, szcz, prz, scdz, and trz—or fail to start at all. Not true of Polish. Interestingly, Serbo-Croatian is essentially the same language spoken, but it is written in a Cyrillic and a Roman script respectively, demarcating the religious lines, Greek Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat), that divide the population of speakers. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody “cleansing” of Balkan ethnicities, Serbian and Croatian present politically as separate languages (roll eyes here; yet another people, like the English and Americans, separated by a common language). Kasubian, a tongue with Pomeranian influences, aspires to the status of a separate language and not a mere dialect of Polish. Linguists, including our instructor, are not unsympathetic to their claims, which must ultimately be decided by the United Nations. As for Polish, our instructor notes, it is simply one of the more difficult of foreign languages for English speakers.
Among the difficulties—pretty much true of all Slavic languages—is that Polish is highly inflected; it distinguishes seven grammatical cases, whereas English and German manage to get by with three or four: nominative, accusative/dative, and genitive, that is, a subject form (“I”), an object form, direct and indirect in English (“me”), and a possessive form (“my”). The Poles, like other Slavs and the ancient Romans, add three more: a vocative, an instrumental, and a locative. When I signed up, I was aware that Polish was more or less doubly inflective, and could consequently, unlike English and German, have a highly variable sentence word order. (As well as having “different words for everything,” as Steve Martin has so perspicuously observed of French.) But on that first day, we were introduced as well to pronunciation “rules” about the voicing and devoicing of consonants, depending on the vowel sound that follows or its position in the word. The letter “b,” for example, often sounds as an English “b,” but in the presence of other letters is devoiced to sound like an English “p.” Now, Polish has a letter “p” that sounds like the English letter “p,” so why not write the sound with a single letter? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Who made these “rules,” by the way, and were they vodka-influenced? When our instructor alluded to verb aspect, which we will take up later, my head began to spin.
There are very good reasons, of course, for the bewildering complexity and the seeming irrationalities of all languages (think “knight,” “night,” and “ignite” in English; “there,” “their,” and “they’re”). At least, those reasons seem good and natural and obvious (but unconsciously so) for speakers viewing the language from within. To those on the outside learning it, they’re, well, crazy, okay, maybe not crazy, but weird, or, well, you know, kinda arbitrary. Which they are, at one level; all language derives from an absolutely arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon association between signs (sounds/written words) and things. We agree upon them in time, and we agree upon the changes over time. Language, like life and love, perhaps, is history—a metaphor I’ve been pondering.
A new language is like a new love, fresh, compelling, demanding, complex, and seemingly impossible, especially to a man over fifty. A knowledge of linguistics, like the knowledge of women and love generally, helps, but not nearly enough. A knowledge of other foreign languages, like the experience of other lovers, helps as well, some, but anyone who has ever applied an amorous principle, practice, or trick extramurally can attest to its potential for disaster. The rule for devoicing consonants in Polish proceeds from right to left, in Russian, from left to right (or vice versa, let me double check.) Every language then, like every woman, has an experience of its own, and a logic and coherence deriving exclusively from the interactions of the lives of its speakers in their world. Understanding, mastery require patience, attention, commitment, time, and work, maybe a lifetime thereof, or the rest of a lifetime.
Among the difficulties—pretty much true of all Slavic languages—is that Polish is highly inflected; it distinguishes seven grammatical cases, whereas English and German manage to get by with three or four: nominative, accusative/dative, and genitive, that is, a subject form (“I”), an object form, direct and indirect in English (“me”), and a possessive form (“my”). The Poles, like other Slavs and the ancient Romans, add three more: a vocative, an instrumental, and a locative. When I signed up, I was aware that Polish was more or less doubly inflective, and could consequently, unlike English and German, have a highly variable sentence word order. (As well as having “different words for everything,” as Steve Martin has so perspicuously observed of French.) But on that first day, we were introduced as well to pronunciation “rules” about the voicing and devoicing of consonants, depending on the vowel sound that follows or its position in the word. The letter “b,” for example, often sounds as an English “b,” but in the presence of other letters is devoiced to sound like an English “p.” Now, Polish has a letter “p” that sounds like the English letter “p,” so why not write the sound with a single letter? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Who made these “rules,” by the way, and were they vodka-influenced? When our instructor alluded to verb aspect, which we will take up later, my head began to spin.
There are very good reasons, of course, for the bewildering complexity and the seeming irrationalities of all languages (think “knight,” “night,” and “ignite” in English; “there,” “their,” and “they’re”). At least, those reasons seem good and natural and obvious (but unconsciously so) for speakers viewing the language from within. To those on the outside learning it, they’re, well, crazy, okay, maybe not crazy, but weird, or, well, you know, kinda arbitrary. Which they are, at one level; all language derives from an absolutely arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon association between signs (sounds/written words) and things. We agree upon them in time, and we agree upon the changes over time. Language, like life and love, perhaps, is history—a metaphor I’ve been pondering.
A new language is like a new love, fresh, compelling, demanding, complex, and seemingly impossible, especially to a man over fifty. A knowledge of linguistics, like the knowledge of women and love generally, helps, but not nearly enough. A knowledge of other foreign languages, like the experience of other lovers, helps as well, some, but anyone who has ever applied an amorous principle, practice, or trick extramurally can attest to its potential for disaster. The rule for devoicing consonants in Polish proceeds from right to left, in Russian, from left to right (or vice versa, let me double check.) Every language then, like every woman, has an experience of its own, and a logic and coherence deriving exclusively from the interactions of the lives of its speakers in their world. Understanding, mastery require patience, attention, commitment, time, and work, maybe a lifetime thereof, or the rest of a lifetime.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
unAmerican
A resolve to become Polish suggests some dissatisfaction with America, being American. After fifty years of having been, I must cop to a certain, even a radical, discontent. A distinct and elemental and unyielding exasperation, though not, in the end, a disabling one. I like my country well enough. It has its moments and special places. But America has always loomed too large and just too much generally for me to love with any kind of intimacy or enthusiasm. I myself am not large, and while I have been known to contradict myself, I do not contain multitudes. The exuberant, the omniveros, the generous Walt Whitman sang a patriotism far too expansive for me. I prefer the paean of a more central American, that of Jose Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican.
I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (and I know it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, castles,
a rundown city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Which is not to say that I hate my country or regret my being and having been an American, I don’t. Rather, one comes to understand that the fullness of life, the fullness of being human, perhaps even a full understanding of being American, may require more than a single national experience. (How many such fullness may require, I do not know, only that I have to get started.) Something about small countries attracts me, the limitedness of non-superpowers, of subject states, underdogs, lost causes, even of the defeated, and this style of patriotism, which Pacheco slyly names “High Treason.”
I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (and I know it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, castles,
a rundown city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Which is not to say that I hate my country or regret my being and having been an American, I don’t. Rather, one comes to understand that the fullness of life, the fullness of being human, perhaps even a full understanding of being American, may require more than a single national experience. (How many such fullness may require, I do not know, only that I have to get started.) Something about small countries attracts me, the limitedness of non-superpowers, of subject states, underdogs, lost causes, even of the defeated, and this style of patriotism, which Pacheco slyly names “High Treason.”
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Embers in the Steppe
Finished Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe Wednesday and feel only slightly more Polish—a little tired, a little defeated, a little melancholy—as if one had actually campaigned against the Turks but seen little action: it’s a long, fairly flat read of the epic sort. One book jacket reviewer claims that “If you are going to read only one literary work in your life about Poland, read Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy.” Perhaps, but if you are that reader, I recommend you read it when you are a boy. Parts of this third volume would make a reasonably salable video game, that is to say, a ripping good bloodbath, but the book as a whole and the love story dominating it are less satisfactory.
One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.
Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.
One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.
But it was too late for realizations and regrets. Lusnia stooped down, grasped Azia by the hips so that he’d be able to move them back and forth, in much the way that a seamstress moved the eye of a needle she is about to thread, and barked an order at the men who held the waiting horses.
“Move out! Slowly and together!”
The horses started forward. The ropes tightened and pulled on Azia’s legs. His body slid along the ground for barely a moment before it struck the crudely sharpened point of the young, felled tree. [It gets rather graphic here, page 602-3 for the less squeamish among you.]
“Slowly!” the sergeant growled.[The stake is raised and imbedded in the ground.]
Azia looked down upon all this from his dreadful height. He was fully conscious. This form of execution, which came to the Commonwealth from Valachia a long time before, was all the more dreadful because an impaled victim sometimes lived as long as three days.[Then it gets worse before Sienkiewicz finally ignites him.]
Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Fire in the Steppe
Looking for a beach read in a second-hand bookstore, I found instead Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe, the third fat volume (700 pages) in his heavy trilogy of the Polish national experience in the mid 1600s. While never actually cracking it on the beach (too much sand, too much sun, too much wind, too much surf—how do people actually manage to read on the beach?) I did make it through the first 200 pages in the air-conditioned beach house. On page 199 you can read, “A foreigner is always just a stepson in any other country, but our good Motherland [Poland] will stretch her arms to him and hug him to her breast from the start.”
These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.
But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.
These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.
But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Beginning Polish
This afternoon I enrolled in Beginning Polish at the university. While not usually the first step to becoming Polish, learning the language is without doubt the longest, hardest, and most important of slogs. Language bears and impresses more culture per unit effort than any other ethnomorphic activity. At the very least, if you can talk the talk, you’ve walked a good deal of the walk.
Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.
Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Becoming Polakiem
You will no doubt have noticed the eight day delay between when I first decided to blog—unfortunate word, really, “blog”: from “blahblahblah” + “fog”—and my first post. A number of reasons account for the delay. First, having overcome a shyness to publication of any kind, I had to learn the basics of the contemporary push-button vanity press. Amazingly simple as it has turned out to be, still, cognitive and psychological hurdles had to be overcome in the process. Though by no means a Luddite, nor am I an early adopter of any technology. I seem to have proven, however, sufficiently techno-savvy and surprisingly vain.
The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.
After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.
Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.
The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.
After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.
Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.
Becoming Polish
Just when in the last couple of years I decided to become Polish, I cannot say precisely, though with a little digging, I could probably narrow it down to the month or the week. The idea first inkled into my mind in 2001 after a trip to the north of Poland, an international family reunion, if reunion is the appropriate term for a gathering of families of virtually complete strangers who have never known union in the first place. Gathering then. I’ve accounted for that gathering elsewhere and won’t dally here, but suffice it to say, my decision to become Polish has been a rather long and deliberate one since then. Recently I have found myself actually talking about becoming Polish to non-family members, strong evidence to me that I have actually decided to do so. We like to think that decision-making is a conscious, rational, left-hemisphere activity providing inexorable, logical outcomes based on the weighing of inputs according to regular sequential patterns. I suspect otherwise. Not that conscious reason doesn’t have its place, but decision and motivation are whole brain processes whose complexities we will never untangle. The mind announces and explains as rationally as possible for social purposes, but never really provides more than an executive summary. So, my dear reader, though I cannot say precisely when—and certainly not quite how—I decided to become Polish, I can say with absolute precision when I decided to inform you about it: today, Friday, July 23, 2010.
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