Our first class of the new semester ended at 9:33 p.m. on what would be one of the coldest nights of the year, and in Minnesota, that’s a cold night—and a black one, the black of deep space, though around the stars, point sources of light, and the moon, were tiny nimbi of gun-metal blue. Anyway, it was cold. Up north they recorded temperatures in the -30s, even before figuring in the wind chills. Here in the Twin Cities, it got down to the -20s, but as I mounted my rime-crusted bike, moj rower, for the ride home, it was probably only in the -10s. The moon though, bright and cold as a blade, was cutting through my layers and somewhat into my will to live, and by extension, my will to study Polish. We had just churned through a number of exercises in the last half hour of class, leaving my mind benumbed, and the good professor assigned what seemed to be double the homework of any week from the first semester. This was Polish II after all. In our second week, the class earned a sharp and uncharacteristic reprimand for not executing these very homework drills with any due speed or competence. We simply weren’t prepared. Still, I can’t say we were any less prepared than in previous weeks, but, again, this was Polish II. When I left my second class, it was still winter and will be for a long time.
A fellow friend of learning recently observed that the second semester of language study was always the hardest. She spoke from her experience in Latin and German. I never made it to second semester Latin and cannot recall second semester German from thirty years ago. But I concede a case can be made and will take her word. Her travail reminds me that learning can hurt, an ancient conclusion, as Aristotle noted in his Politics, “Learning is not a matter of amusement. It is attended by effort and pain”; and Qoheleth, “much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
But the company is really good. The best.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Vulgarities
The late American comic, George Carlin, earned considerable notoriety for a bit he developed in the 1970s entitled, “The Seven Words You Never Hear on Television,” a shortlist of “dirty words” that censors of the American broadcast networks proscribed from the airwaves. There were others, of course, but the shunning of this indecent, indecorous seven made us, children of the 70s, at least in part, the curious prudes and hypocrites that we are today—me, anyway. Not that one didn’t, and doesn’t use them, even with some frequency at times, and to great relief and effect, but that when they drop from my lips, especially in a setting that can be described as “public,” I pause, as if a striped-shirted discourse official might appear and whistle a technical foul. Anymore, these days, it has to be flagrant.
But vulgarity, obscenity, indecency, and malediction provide insight into a language and a culture, as much as its standard literary expression; and a brief foray into the subject, between academic semesters, would seem the time. Hence, I make these preliminary observations after some more than cursory but less than completely thorough surveys of my authorities, the Kosciuszko Dictionary and the naughty and pseudonymous Stanislaw Kielbasa’s Dictionary of Polish Obscenities. The seven words that you would not have heard on American network TV in the 1970s I would identify as the following: gowno, siki, jebac, cipa, mineciara, jebaka, and cyc.
Gowno (goov-na) and siki are noun forms, the results of our indelicate excretories, the latter, siki, interestingly, is in the plural, the liquid collective. The verb forms generating these end products would seem multiple in Polish. Thus, English is more economical; we take half the syllables to crudely articulate our business, and our monosyllables serve as both noun and verb forms. For power, you want brevity in your maledicta. The f-bomb in English I’ve rendered with the verb form jebac (yea-batch), though I could have chosen dupczyc (dub-chich) and ruchac (roo-chach), as well. In the Kosciuszko all three carry the same primary effing definition; “screw” appears second, though seemingly almost synonymous, of course carrying less socio-linguistic opprobrium. Street research will be required to further elucidate the relative power and the appropriate contexts for the apparent manifold forms of the nasty, but again, the options seem more nuanced, less reductive, and thus, gentler. Cipa (chi-pa) feels more feminine than its counterpart in English, vulgar, yes, but softer and mossier. While in the English a particularly ugly word and insult, mineciara refers to the feminine noun form, though the root noun, mineta refers generally to “oral sex”; context, apparently, would determine the specific act, actor, and nature of the insult. Jebaka, though a feminine noun, refers to the masculine actor, though nowhere, even in Kielbasa, do I find the scurrilous addition of matka (“mother”), matkajebaka, to the epithet; though both the alliteration and assonance would creditably replicate the English. As for cyc (tsits), as Carlin originally observed, it shouldn’t even be on the list.
The most popular, or perhaps populous, ribald category in the Dictionary of Polish Obscenities would be those terms referring to the male member, numbering well over a hundred entries. Slangy and obviously metaphoric, they include the Polish words for cannon, banana, bolt, wire, flute, fife, pipe, gland, cable, canary, corporal, hooded monk, bearded man, clarinet, candlewick, rooster, horse, root, tassel, stick, cane, lollipop, barrel, tail, stake, trombone, bell, digit, gun, bird, python, bar, and rascal. Among the more imaginative or felicitous are grzechomierz (“sin-meter”), chabeta (“old horse”), dyndala (“dangler”), and cygaro z bakami (“cigar with sideburns”). I suspect the compiler of this reference work guilty of no little phallocentrism, given that his pseudonym, Kielbasa, is itself on the list.
By contrast, one counts fewer than half that number of references to the Venusian mystery, with many diminutive derivations of a few basic terms. Above cipa, we find a few standard mammary images: balcony, train bumpers, flower pots, knockers, udders, rolls, the twins, and big blue eyes (duze niebieskie oczy). Bar mleczny (“milk bar”) puns off of Communist-era “bars” that specialized in dairy products, social establishments intended to combat alcoholism. Strangely, another term for cyc is przedsiewziecie (“enterprise”), the root for the Polish word for “entrepreneur.” I have no idea.
But vulgarity, obscenity, indecency, and malediction provide insight into a language and a culture, as much as its standard literary expression; and a brief foray into the subject, between academic semesters, would seem the time. Hence, I make these preliminary observations after some more than cursory but less than completely thorough surveys of my authorities, the Kosciuszko Dictionary and the naughty and pseudonymous Stanislaw Kielbasa’s Dictionary of Polish Obscenities. The seven words that you would not have heard on American network TV in the 1970s I would identify as the following: gowno, siki, jebac, cipa, mineciara, jebaka, and cyc.
Gowno (goov-na) and siki are noun forms, the results of our indelicate excretories, the latter, siki, interestingly, is in the plural, the liquid collective. The verb forms generating these end products would seem multiple in Polish. Thus, English is more economical; we take half the syllables to crudely articulate our business, and our monosyllables serve as both noun and verb forms. For power, you want brevity in your maledicta. The f-bomb in English I’ve rendered with the verb form jebac (yea-batch), though I could have chosen dupczyc (dub-chich) and ruchac (roo-chach), as well. In the Kosciuszko all three carry the same primary effing definition; “screw” appears second, though seemingly almost synonymous, of course carrying less socio-linguistic opprobrium. Street research will be required to further elucidate the relative power and the appropriate contexts for the apparent manifold forms of the nasty, but again, the options seem more nuanced, less reductive, and thus, gentler. Cipa (chi-pa) feels more feminine than its counterpart in English, vulgar, yes, but softer and mossier. While in the English a particularly ugly word and insult, mineciara refers to the feminine noun form, though the root noun, mineta refers generally to “oral sex”; context, apparently, would determine the specific act, actor, and nature of the insult. Jebaka, though a feminine noun, refers to the masculine actor, though nowhere, even in Kielbasa, do I find the scurrilous addition of matka (“mother”), matkajebaka, to the epithet; though both the alliteration and assonance would creditably replicate the English. As for cyc (tsits), as Carlin originally observed, it shouldn’t even be on the list.
The most popular, or perhaps populous, ribald category in the Dictionary of Polish Obscenities would be those terms referring to the male member, numbering well over a hundred entries. Slangy and obviously metaphoric, they include the Polish words for cannon, banana, bolt, wire, flute, fife, pipe, gland, cable, canary, corporal, hooded monk, bearded man, clarinet, candlewick, rooster, horse, root, tassel, stick, cane, lollipop, barrel, tail, stake, trombone, bell, digit, gun, bird, python, bar, and rascal. Among the more imaginative or felicitous are grzechomierz (“sin-meter”), chabeta (“old horse”), dyndala (“dangler”), and cygaro z bakami (“cigar with sideburns”). I suspect the compiler of this reference work guilty of no little phallocentrism, given that his pseudonym, Kielbasa, is itself on the list.
By contrast, one counts fewer than half that number of references to the Venusian mystery, with many diminutive derivations of a few basic terms. Above cipa, we find a few standard mammary images: balcony, train bumpers, flower pots, knockers, udders, rolls, the twins, and big blue eyes (duze niebieskie oczy). Bar mleczny (“milk bar”) puns off of Communist-era “bars” that specialized in dairy products, social establishments intended to combat alcoholism. Strangely, another term for cyc is przedsiewziecie (“enterprise”), the root for the Polish word for “entrepreneur.” I have no idea.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Promised Land
Between semesters, my discipline for study wanes, and I persuade myself that attending to the Facebook posts of my Polish cousins, visiting the home page of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and watching a Polish movie—subtitled in English—count as language and culture study. They do, sure, but it’s scholarship lite. One catches a few new words, accustoms oneself to actually seeing or hearing phrases in genuine Polish use, and notices those curious features of language that make us (nerds) love words. A cousin posted a snapshot of herself at a costume party and used the word zdjecie (“photo”). Then, that very evening, I encountered it again in the opening movie credits as zdjecia (I read “cinematography”). Thus, a single root encompasses the high and low, the full range of visual expression from party pic to Academy-Award-nominated framing shot, just as, in English, we “paint” the bathroom and the Mona Lisa. (An artist brother of mine, MFA University of Hartford, calls them all “pichers.”)
Andrzej Wajda is probably the best and best known of the Polish film directors of the modern era, which has been mostly Communist, though he is hardly a socialist ideologue or propagandist. Ziemia Obiecana (“Promised Land,” 1974) depicts the 19th-century industrialization of textile production in Lodz (pronounced “Woodj”) in antique tints as much Dickensian and Oliver Stonian, as Marxian. The film inhabits a misty, smoky industrial sfumato; exteriors draped with the black effluent of factory smokestacks, interiors with cigar smoke and the wafting fog of torched millworks. Excellent zdjecia.
The main protagonist, Karol Borowiecki (I take special ironic note of the name: mine was originally Charles Borowicz), handsome, energetic, driven, dabbles with, when not committing outright, just about every possible serious felony and human sin in the tragic achievement of becoming a captain of Polish industry. He ultimately orders the shooting of striking workers, but along the way demonstrates an equally perfect indifference to human suffering at all points, but on a smaller scale: a factory worker who loses at least an arm, probably two, much blood and probably his life in a rolling machine earns no sympathy and hardly a response from Borowiecki, who instead orders everyone else back to work and laments the loss of cloth to blood stain; he brushes off a fellow industrialist looking for a temporary personal loan with a recommendation to set fire to his own factory for the insurance money, and he disregards the industrialist’s muttering in despair an intention to kill himself—an intention the latter shortly fulfills with a pistol shot to the head; Borowiecki betrays his fiancée with his mistress and eventually his pregnant mistress as well for a lucrative marriage of convenience; he sells his noble patrimony to a sugar-sucking, upwardly-mobile boor, probably a peasant; and he traffics in conspiracy and insider-trading, though these habits are less explicitly crimes or sins in capitalist economies and more like standard operating procedures. My almost namesake Borowiecki represents an object lesson in how dehumanizing ambition can be, in this case with capitalist trappings.
It is unclear what Wajda meant by the “Promised Land”: perhaps, the previous Poland of the noble tradition, which is represented with surprising nostalgia, or the coming socialist Poland represented by a wounded striker’s red kerchief. Or, more possibly, to a socialist Poland that was yet to come, even in 1974—and one destined never to arrive. Or, to the living myth of a “Promised Land” that has been promised to all people and nations (cue the Boss), for which, alack, there is just not enough real estate on earth. Watching the film unassisted by subtitles, I tallied understanding just over 100 words and a dozen phrases, many of which were used more than once, to be sure; however, at the moment, mine is too meager a vocabulary for gaining entry into any promised land.
Andrzej Wajda is probably the best and best known of the Polish film directors of the modern era, which has been mostly Communist, though he is hardly a socialist ideologue or propagandist. Ziemia Obiecana (“Promised Land,” 1974) depicts the 19th-century industrialization of textile production in Lodz (pronounced “Woodj”) in antique tints as much Dickensian and Oliver Stonian, as Marxian. The film inhabits a misty, smoky industrial sfumato; exteriors draped with the black effluent of factory smokestacks, interiors with cigar smoke and the wafting fog of torched millworks. Excellent zdjecia.
The main protagonist, Karol Borowiecki (I take special ironic note of the name: mine was originally Charles Borowicz), handsome, energetic, driven, dabbles with, when not committing outright, just about every possible serious felony and human sin in the tragic achievement of becoming a captain of Polish industry. He ultimately orders the shooting of striking workers, but along the way demonstrates an equally perfect indifference to human suffering at all points, but on a smaller scale: a factory worker who loses at least an arm, probably two, much blood and probably his life in a rolling machine earns no sympathy and hardly a response from Borowiecki, who instead orders everyone else back to work and laments the loss of cloth to blood stain; he brushes off a fellow industrialist looking for a temporary personal loan with a recommendation to set fire to his own factory for the insurance money, and he disregards the industrialist’s muttering in despair an intention to kill himself—an intention the latter shortly fulfills with a pistol shot to the head; Borowiecki betrays his fiancée with his mistress and eventually his pregnant mistress as well for a lucrative marriage of convenience; he sells his noble patrimony to a sugar-sucking, upwardly-mobile boor, probably a peasant; and he traffics in conspiracy and insider-trading, though these habits are less explicitly crimes or sins in capitalist economies and more like standard operating procedures. My almost namesake Borowiecki represents an object lesson in how dehumanizing ambition can be, in this case with capitalist trappings.
It is unclear what Wajda meant by the “Promised Land”: perhaps, the previous Poland of the noble tradition, which is represented with surprising nostalgia, or the coming socialist Poland represented by a wounded striker’s red kerchief. Or, more possibly, to a socialist Poland that was yet to come, even in 1974—and one destined never to arrive. Or, to the living myth of a “Promised Land” that has been promised to all people and nations (cue the Boss), for which, alack, there is just not enough real estate on earth. Watching the film unassisted by subtitles, I tallied understanding just over 100 words and a dozen phrases, many of which were used more than once, to be sure; however, at the moment, mine is too meager a vocabulary for gaining entry into any promised land.
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