Under the weather and the perfect storm of information known without affection here as Swan: Chapter 9, I hack and grind and resist paralysis both physically and mentally, a rheumy struggle all round. I fall into oblivion, awaken from oblivion unrested, take drugs, hack, grind, resist, and repeat. One has no idea how the ancients did this, though obviously they didn’t do it in Minnesota in the winter. I don’t complain, only observe.
I will register my first complaint, however, with our main text, Oscar Swan’s First-Year Polish. Last week he introduced us to about 20 Polish adjectives ending in –ny, a special case for declension, and to the names of about 20 animals. (He also introduced us to plurals, variations on adverb and adjective forms, and the declension of possessive pronouns; the complexities up for complaint with those topics are not Swan’s, but the language’s.) My complaint with Swan centers on the exercises in which, killing two birds (ptaki) with one stone—we’ve not yet been introduced to geological terms—Swan has us combining the adjectives with the animals, repeatedly, gymnastically, and ultimately, absurdly. Of course, one can resort to the stereotypical anthropomorphisms of pretty birds, comfortable cats, ambitious lions and eagles, funny ducks and geese, beautiful peacocks and swans, intelligent elephants and pigs, strange fish, finicky poodles, ingenious horses, popular dogs, cruel crocodiles, polite sheep, and efficient German Shepherds. By exercise 2, you’ve pretty exhausted the obvious conventions. There are fifteen exercises. In the post-modern world, or a fiction-writing class, eliciting unusual combinations might be a spark to insight or creativity. But what could possibly be meant by talented ducks, well-bred crocodiles, and cruel chickens. That a chicken (kura), probably a rooster, might, on occasion, exhibit behavior that would appear to the human eye as “cruel” (okrutny), I grant, but one probably would not apply the term to the plural “chickens” as a class with anything like fairness. (In Polish, by the way, Swan is Labedz, with a barred L, pronounced Wa-bendj. I find no appropriate adjective from the list to express my frustration with him.) And his strange (dziwny) choice to combine these two topics leads to the following questions for translation: “Why does your new cow look so sad?” and “Is that the same goose. No it’s a different one.” Beware of cruel poultry and depressed cows in Poland.
And besides, just now, I need the content from Chapter 13: Jestem chory (“I’m sick.”)
