Z is for ...

S is for satisfakticzny, or should be, but because there seems not to be such a word in Polish, I guess I get a Z, for zadowalajacy, “satisfactory.” My quiz grades in the last half of class had been steadily dropping, B+, B-, C+, such that continued study under those conditions would have eventually ended in failure. I managed probably a B on the final, though the oral portion did not go particularly well. Next semester I will not have to teach overload, so I can resume under better conditions; however, I must confess that classroom and textbook instruction begins to wear thin. I is for immersion. I’ll need to get to Poland.

Wszystkiego Najlepszego w Nowym Roku

Polonistyka

It has been a long time since I’ve taken a thumping on a quiz—years, well, decades actually. But Klasowka #5 did a number on me. Unprepared as I knew I was, nevertheless the first page surprised me, stunned me, stupefied me. Initially perfectly clueless, and I mean both clueless and perfectly, I turned to the second page in search of a question I had any confidence whatsoever in answering. The returned quiz indicates quite a bloodletting, multiple shivings, now dried, revealing a loss of twenty points on the first page alone, with only six pristine responses of twenty items. On the second page, I dropped fourteen points filling in the remaining blanks, a nasty gauntlet of genitives and locatives. Somehow I managed the last half, the translation portion, with a minimum of damage, surrendering only an additional six and a half points, for a total of forty demerits. A forty-point loss over a mere three pages, earning me the worst quiz grade of my non-degree career, a B-. Which indicates one of two things: that Polish is a difficult language, with enormous opportunities for error; or, rumors of grade inflation in the modern academy are well founded. Much of both, I suspect.

We learned last week a new word, a new concept, polonistyka, “Polish studies,” an important and humbling addition to my vocabulary, for if I fail to become Polakiem, a name for that failure already exists, Polonistykanem.

Falls the Snow

Pada snieg. Padac (“to fall”), snieg (“snow”): “falls the snow”. Who doesn’t love the unconscious poetry of straight translation, the rendering of one language, word for word, unidiomatically into another. As if other cultures spoke and thought routinely in King James English, archaic, beautifully inverted. Falls the snow. It was snowing here Saturday night, three inches of the rich stuff, ermine and pearl. Comes the winter.  

Shifting Sounds

I no longer inwardly fume and outwardly decry the seven cases of Polish grammar, nor the rules and the exceptions of basic noun declension that derive from them. After fifteen months of exposure I’ve come to believe that in the score of years biblically remaining to me, a diligent person could achieve a reasonable, even relatively supple, grasp of their workings. After all, there are only seven cases, WHEREAS, in the Locative Case alone, twenty sound shifts occur. And what I mean by sound shifts is that in addition to remembering the appropriate endings by case, gender, and number (there are 5 endings), the ending itself can cause a shift in the sound of the consonant ending the noun stem. For example, one of the two standard endings for masculine singular nouns is e. But the e ending requires a sound shift, a “softening” of all hard consonants, which number 20. For example, the locative of kot (“cat”) would seem perfectly pronounceable to the English tongue as kote, “KOT-ay.” But this would be far too simple. Instead, Polish “softens” the t to a c and adds ie: kocie, “KO-chiej.” Admittedly, eight of the consonantal shifts require only an additional i before the e, an i which audibly, even visibly, softens the likes of p, b, f, w, m, s, z, and n to the American ear and perhaps even the eye. But what of r? It softens not with an i, but with a … any guesses, correct! How did you know? A z! The locative of biuro (“office”) is biurze, “byOR-zhe.” As if biurie were not soft and euphonious enough—which it is, btw.  And the velar g softens to … dze; k to c, pronounced, by the way as “ts.” As I reflect upon my making peace with the case system in Polish, I suspect that it has something to do with my emerging frustration with shifting sounds, just as a new and barbarous nemesis makes an honorable and worthy ally of an immediate previous nemesis.

Our instructor no longer refers to the regularity and mathematical precision of Polish. In some deep, historico-linguistic analysis the logic of the linguistic structure may be true and clear, or at least arguable, but to us, the heritage learner, the rules of Polish grammar seem just a little of rhyme with no reason, a bit of reason, but rhymeless. Learning Polish is like life: we have hopes (mam nadzieje) that it will all make sense at some point in the distant future, that it will not only be comprehensible, but comprehensible to me. We have glimmerings of its possible orderliness, assurances of its order with frank confessions of its disorderliness and exceptionality. We choose to persevere because, really, there is little choice. And tonight I realize, having just had my ass kicked by the quiz on Locative Case, that learning Polish isn’t a metaphor for life: just now it is life, or a large part of it.

All Souls

All Souls Day this week, Zaduszki, and All Saints, though I have less to do with them—and they with me. The souls, however, the old, the dead and the lost, are my preferred company; they’re quiet, wistful, wise, and don’t eat a lot. The Poles observe, even celebrate All Souls, with food and fire in the cemeteries in a way little imaginable in the squeamish U.S. A candlelight picnic among the tombs and stones would seem morbid here. Sources infer, and I’m happy to believe, in the holiday’s pagan origins: food to appease the dead and candles to light their way elsewhere, redirect their wandering. I’ve lighted my own candle here in the study, and Joanna Koslowska, soprano, calls out now on CD to the composer himself, Henryk Gorecki, lately enrolled among the souls. The somberly perfect start to November, listopad, the month of the fallen leaves.

Our third quiz returned Tuesday night, the class spent All Saints eating pizza and watching Andrzej Wajda’s film version of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. I’d forgotten most of the story line, having read a translation some years ago and not followed it terribly well in translation. The Wajda viewed excellently, refreshed my memory, and renewed my love of all language not grammar. How I miss literature.

Poland has distinguished itself on two counts this week. A LOT pilot succeeded in belly-landing a Boeing 767 with 230 passengers after the landing gear failed to deploy. I was reminded of my second trip to Poland, in which my LOT seatmate, more or less out of the blue, complimented Polish airmanship as second to none. I was not aware that it had been questioned. I was not aware that Poland had had a particularly illustrious flight tradition. The heavy cavalry, the husaria, were magnificently winged, but they never actually took flight. And Sikorski, the WWII president in exile, became the namesake of a helicopter. At any rate, Poland has produced a hero, and, also noteworthy, the most successful economy for growth in Europe in these troubled times. No joke.  

Polish Joke

My carpenter, Tony, my stolarz; my plumber, my hydraulik, Geno; and my elektryk, Scott, have worked their magic—the bathroom almost gemlike, white as a lucky stone, gleaming like a wet one. And the painters, the malarze pokojowe, have stripped and primed and double-glossed my eaves in creamy beige. The maples, klony, and the ash, jesion, have been pruned high, like Pan Zagloba’s haircut—the Pan Zagloba of Ogniem i mieczim—their leaves raked and hauled to the city compost. My house, a charming cozy dom, approaches not perfection, but the neighborhood of almost perfection, of really quite good enough. Yes, the damned wiewiorki have gnawed through the shakes in too many places, and the woodpeckers, dziecioly, less infernal, have poked tight little messages onto my outside walls. And the gutter remains gutted. I might yet get to the west dining room window. Still, such a basically tidy domicile—it will be hard, now harder, to leave. Perhaps I should postpone entry into the market until February.

Geno—I’ve come to like my artisans—shared with me a Polish joke. He said he has this Polish friend, from Poland, and this friend says to Geno, “Hey, Geno, want to hear a really good Polish joke?” And Geno, a little suspicious says, “Okayyy.” And his friend says, “Tak, no to, ci dwaj panowie…” Good one, I say. Then I recount my favorite Polish joke, courtesy of my brother Alex, courtesy of his friend, courtesy of the internet:

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver's license. First, of course, he had to take an eye test. The optician showed him a card with the letters

C Z W I K S N O S T A C Z.

'Can you read this?' the optician asked. 'Read it?' the Pole replied, 'I know that guy.'

I had to edit this joke; Aleks, dear brother, there is no X in the Polish alphabet.

Anyway, as the domestic infrastructure improves and with it my Polish vocabulary, I become all the more aware of the time, approaching, when I will take leave of my life here.

Pazdziernik

The vocabulary multiplies, the sound shifts proliferate, and the grammar rules increase and interconnect each week to the point of mute exasperation, but not yet to despair. Not that Polish isn’t orderly, but given its complexity, and the fact that all order has core elements of arbitrariness and historical whim, Polish order is not as strictly logical as common sense might expect. (And my sense is nothing but common.) I have noted before a class of masculine noun with the feminine ending –a, kolega, sluzbista, artysta, mezczyzna. The word declines as a feminine noun, but takes masculine adjectives and their declinations—fair enough—but now we discover only in the singular. Because? Yes, because. Because that is the way it is. If Polish verbs agree in number in the present tense, but in number and gender in the past and future tenses, so be it. I try to be reasonable. Why is this necessary? (I have yet to encounter a sentence or a rhetorical situation in which these fine grammatical distinctions communicate any significance proportional to the intellectual effort it takes to remember them.) After over a year of study, my classmates and I still offer answers to the most seemingly straightforward exercises as educated guesses with the intonation of questions. Strangely, Professor Polakiewicz endures that intonation with greater patience and even sympathy now, as he warns us about verbs of motion and the further nuances of the number system. I soldier forward, chin high, up to my moustache tips in grammar and usage.

The carpenter comes on Tuesday, we wtorek, the plumber on Wednesday, w srode, and the painters later this month, pazdziernik. A step here, a step there.

Nie

Poles have a thing for the negative, it seems, pay it special attention. The double negative rules in grammar: Nic, nie mam.  “Nothing, I don’t have/I don't have nothing,” that is, “I don’t have anything.” Nikt, tu nie znam. “No one, here I don’t know;” or, “I don’t know anyone here.” Except when you triple negative: Nigdy, nigdzie nie ide. “Never, nowhere I don’t go.” “I never go anywhere.” Furthermore, when you negate a transitive verb, you highlight it by shifting the case of the object from accusative to genitive. (As if remembering the accusative weren’t tricky enough.)  Nigdy, nie ma mleka, not Nigdy nie ma mleko. I can’t even think how to double negate this phrase in English; it means, “There’s never any milk.” (“Never not is there milk”?) And historically, of course, Poles were notorious for the Liberum Veto, the power of a single, noble, contrary member of the Sejm to forbid any legislation just by saying nie.  Other great nugatory political principles stud the social fabric: Nic o nas bez nas (“Nothing about us without us”) and Nihil novi (“Nothing new”). There’s no mistaking: No meant something, nie.

Living as we do, in the land of the Everlasting Yea, where the power of positive thinking, issuing in great volumes of happy talk and promising slogans, “Yes, we can,” I appreciate the unvapid negative as strangely tonic, cantankerously inviting—if you don’t make it a habit. In what country do they say, “Maybe we can, perhaps not, but let’s give it a try”? Moze mozemy, moze nie, ale probujmy.

Pan Josh

The first class of the semester garnered me two things from the instructor, Professor Polakiewicz—need I remind anyone, “Professor-Son-of-the-Pole”—a compliment on my moustache and a new form of address, Pan Josh. Pan is the Polish masculine titular, meaning “Mr.,” “Sir,” or “Lord,” as in Pan Tadeusz, Poland’s signature epic poem by Adam Mickiewicz. Okay, so, a younger Josh has just joined the class, and a certain distinction is now required. But don’t tell me it has nothing to do with moje polskie wasy, moje dobrze ubranie polskie wasy, “my well-dressed Polish moustache(s).” 

Uncool

I have no time to waste this semester, a predicament that doesn't really prevent me from wasting time, though I probably waste less of it, mostly at work, surfing the web, where one happens upon "news" stories, verging on the nonchalant and astonishingly inane. This week I happened upon a report of survey results that accounted the U.S. and Americans the "coolest" of 15 national cultural options; Poles and Poland rated second to last, worsted only by Belgium and the Belgians. The survey, the method, the population hardly bear reference, even mention, so lax a research question, so spurious a method, so unrepresentative a population--a social network. Heavens. In what kind of universe does such an absurd exercise pretend to any meaning at all? (Answer: one in which Fox News [sic] does not spontaneously dissolve in its own vitriol.) The second least cool? False, stupid, categorically false, patently stupid, and yet, somewhat encouraging to someone as uncool as myself. Maybe I can get in.

Spring into Fall

This evening I finished volume III of Reymont's The Peasants: Spring. It ends with the death of old Mattias Boryna, first of the peasant husbandmen of Lipka, mortally injured at the end of Winter in a village uprising against the local Squire, who had been logging illegally in the peasant wood. The final volume, Summer, I won't likely get to until winter. Tomorrow I begin my third semester of Polish language study.

In 1924, for the most part on the strength of The Peasants, Ladislas Reymont won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the same year that my grandfather, Aleksander, returned to Poland, though without either Reymont's or Boryna's material success. Other coincidences reveal themselves in the reading. Lipka, as it turns out, was based on the town Lowicz, south of Torun, which is only @ 30-40 km from Kikot and Lipno, towns associated with my grandfather's "estate" and his birth and early years. The conditions Reymont describes, physical and economic and political, were those contemporary with my grandfather's and my great-grandfather, Vincenty's, generations. Reymont's pictures of country, peasant life are worth their thousands of words, and like Sienkiewicz's images of the nobility, they tend toward the mythic, and yet the familiar, because I have seen family pictures, even taken some--of Vincenty's well and the remains of the foundation of his house or barn--and trodden upon those very lands. An earthy heroism, even a dirty one, redolent of animals and manure, but also of cut hay and miscellaneous wildflowers.

Plsh 3001

Yesterday morning (wczoraj rano) I registered for second-year Polish, pass-fail. Work circumstances prevent me from giving as much time as I would like to the subject, and much less than it deserves from its true students. Can't stop, though. I had originally intended to audit the course, that is, sit in on the lectures and exercises, receive instruction, but not be subject to evaluation and examination. The Regents Scholarship, however, won't subsidize such liberal learning. The modern University must pay for grading and credentialing. Education is dear, they say, but not so expensive as ignorance. Still, one doesn't need to ruin one's post-doctoral, non-degree GPA in the process. Hoping for an easy S.

Sierpien

August winds down, all but lost to enhanced Polishness. My language skills deteriorate with disuse, laziness, and distraction. The brief windfall of cultural advance provided by my Polish guest cannot make up the deficit, so that the season will show a net loss of ethnicity. After some initial progress in the logistics of migration, my real estatesmanship flags, stalls, and I find myself no closer to the old country, no farther east. Some do-it-myselfishness has led to a mangled front door (hammer, cold chisel). My computer crashed. There is a squirrel, wiewiorka, in the attic. I detest wiewiorki, sentimentalized, bushy-tailed rats, who keep me up nights with their skittering. So much to do. Psiakrew! On a positive note, I did manage, quite by accident, to visit Kramarczyk's grocery and deli in Northeast, the Baltic quarter of Minneapolis, and I did pick up volumes II and II of The Peasants. Paltry efforts, but my only forward ones.  

Stas

My face this week observes six full months of proto-Polish moustache. While not its fullest growth, it has, it seems, reached a fundamental maturity, at which its character can be judged and its future indicated.

Other than snipping the most twisted and unruly of outliers, I have yet to clip this creature, and its most ambitious and well-bred members recline inches long above my lips, almost long enough to style. A vicuna collar, a mink lapel. The proximal process, from philtrum to nostril flare, dips routinely into my tea, the foam of a Guinness, and, of course, my vodka. As so often observed in Sienkiewicz’s trilogy, grain spirits dribble down and drip off the gathered tips like melt off a ridge of icicles, like seepage off stalactic kielce. An admittedly sloppy business. Napkins, kerchiefs seem suddenly relevant and a very mainstay of civilization. A walrusy brush (though I’m the slightest of walri), this sector protrudes with the effrontery of Pilsudski. The medial process flows down and rolls around the corner of my mouth with a graceful turn, like the wings of Sobieski’s hussarial victory over the Turks. The distal process, with some care and coaxing, curls down, like the rebel Cossack Bohun’s, but it twists as well, perversely, at its limit into the orthodox tendril of a Jewish boy. It is, thus, triply, perhaps, quadruply, Polish. (Admittedly, one sees Wild Bill Hickock, Yosemite Sam, and any number of Confederate generals—until recently, Nathan Bedford Forrest—in this cockade, but Polishness has affinities with the insane liberty and the cavalier pride of the American Wild West and ante-bellum south, respectively.)  

In these weeks, my moustache has become a thing unto itself, an independent entity. Its beingness insists upon regard. I, myself, am not a particularly insistent fellow and crave nonentity, but my companion elicits comment from family, friend, and cultural authority; I must respond on its behalf, sometimes in my own defense. My son, moj drogi syn, laughed the laugh of the incredulously curious and twitted me with little remorse. Advisees and colleagues require explanation. I have, more or less unconsciously, acceded to its demands. The gestures of moustache care—the index knuckle bump, the thumb brush, the snidely tip pinch and twist (down, in my case)—which at one time seemed so affected, are, in truth, the most natural of hand-to-mouth interactions, a dance, mostly private. One pets, one grooms, pinches, crimps, one autonomously (and, yes, affectionately) attends to it, like a sort of superior companion animal—one that you don’t have to feed or clean up after. It is surprisingly soft and sleek. While not quite silk, neither does it bristle like quill; it comprises rather the textures of shaving brush, cashmere, and feather, and drapes in concrete gray with highlights of chrome and the odd filament of copper. I have dispensed with the chin whiskrage, snow white, or ice white, an ivory cube between tongs; it aged me unduly, and I’m not that hip, not a jazz musician or a beat. The soul patch proved culturally superfluous (and I'm doubtful of the existence of my own and would prefer not to advertise falsely). While many Poles definitely wore beards, moustache holds significant pride of place. 

I have had the honor these past couple of weeks of hosting an imminently distinguished Polish academic from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, a doctor of sociology and cultural studies, specializing in immigration, who has sympathetically assessed my Polish ethnic progress. While my language skills require constant correction, and she has on at least one occasion reproved an interpretive error of mine with a complete dismissal, "You know nothing about Polish culture," she generally approves my appearance: “You have such a Polish moustache!” Otherwise an encouraging pronouncement, yet in the same breath and with a sigh, she indicates that the Polish moustache signals not merely an old school charm, but actual social and pop-cultural obsolescence. Since the extinction of the szlachta, its replacement by a Soviet-influenced preference for clean-shaven Communism, as well as the decadence of the post-modern succession to an overly Westernized, digitized, that is to say, hairless aesthetic, masculinity in contemporary Poland is expressed with less and less reference to the grooming practices of bygone ages. So that I may now sport a vestige, an affectation, perhaps even a parody of Polishness—kitsch.