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.

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.

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.

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.