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.
