Zycie/Life

With spring semester over and time on my hands, I’ve been reading, or rereading actually, but reading, too, so I guess both rereading and reading. I’ve been rereading Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword; I’ve been reading Keith Richards’s Life: With Ax and Smack. (Well okay, I added the subtitle.) No slouch with an R&B lick, yet Keef can’t narrate to save his Life—no story line, no pace, almost pure hedonistic sequence—though aside from that, his book is not without interest, and a good understatement or two, “Land is always the dangerous thing for a boat.” (301) It won’t bear rereading, however.

My second tour of duty in the Ukrainian Steppe, the “Wildlands,” the Sietch, has proved much like the first: nasty, brutish, and almost interminable. Eleven hundred pages, and while not a constantly galloping account of slaughter on an epic scale or sabering on an intimate, the blood of the Poles and Cossacks gushes freely and apace, and, much more to the point on this encore reading, from a common artery. In Sienkiewicz’s eyes, the Poles and the Cossacks were brothers; this was civil war—with, admittedly, little civil about it. “This is a war between brothers!” laments the Voyevode of Kiev, “The blood that flows on both sides is our own!” (441) Well, all men are brothers, more or less; all wars are civil, mostly less. Brotherhood never stopped us from killing one another. Just ask Cain. Brothers, apparently, have to forge their bands against other bands of brothers, and most convincingly, to the death or in the face of it. Wojna! Wojna! gives outlet and the ultimate expression to high-spirited brotherhood: the boys make terrible meaning together, they make war.

And subtler, more sublime meanings, too. After battle, when the wojna slows and quiets, pauses at the funeral of Pan Podbipyenta, Sienkiewicz introduces that rare lyrical and elegiac note on the passing of time, the passing of worlds, and the loss of meaning, of which war might only be a symptom: “Their time was passing. A storm of changes was sweeping through their world. The qualities of knighthood would soon have no meaning. And many of them knew as they mourned Longinus Podbipyenta that they were also weeping for their nations and themselves.” (1066) Sienkiewicz claimed to have written to “uplift [Polish] hearts,” but this brother discovers, perhaps even more, counterpoints of despondency and langor, langor and resignation, futility unto eternal rest. For uplift, I think, I prefer the Stones. Start me up.

Woda dla slonie

My second semester Polish grade is in: A-. Certainly closer to the truth of the matter than its predecessor, and I prefer the qualified, the diminutive in all its lesserness, its modesty, its unwieldy aerodynamics. A straight A average whistles through the stratosphere like a Polish saber; an A- muffles a bit owing to the wind resistance, like a battle hammer or a bulava. As you might guess, I’ve had much more time to reread Sienkiewicz since the final exam, 500 hundred pages, with only a couple hundred more to go.

Of course, I now know Polish better than I did when I received my A. The mechanics of the grading this semester, however, exposed one of my many weaknesses, my composition skills. I can’t compose (komponowac) in Polish, about my work, my family, my country (America) because I cannot think or say anything of interest, anything nuanced, anything rhythmic in the rudimentary Polish that I currently possess, so I think of what I want to say in English, then translate and transliterate and interpret into Polish with B-range results. The professor explained, somewhat apologetically, that I was too ambitious, and that while he took off for errors of grammar and usage, he did not reward for ambition. Never before have I been accused of ambition, but I deflected the charge with my own good nature, “One can learn much from mistakes.”

A second weakness, no doubt, was my oral incomprehension. My reading and pronunciation aren’t too bad, fairly fluid. But understanding the spoken word in its natural tempo and responding to it in a timely and coherent manner must be reserved for semesters hence, perhaps years. Last night I watched a recently released movie—Water for Elephants—upon the recommendation of a former colleague. A period romance—Great Depression, circus—with the indifferent Reese Witherspoon and the wonderful Christoph Waltz, it featured some Polish immigrant and language plot elephants...elements: Rosie, who had been trained in Polish and responded only to Polish commands. While it may seem humiliating to have aural skills inferior to a pachyderm, I now have a role model. Thanks, Jack.

WUI

Took the final tonight, seven pages, not so bad, a few educated guesses, then rode home on the outskirts of a thunderstorm jaundiced with intimations of tornado—one that never lived up to that ominous promise, though it did shower Minneapolis with egg-sized hail. Decided to observe the occasion with the wet kiss of drink, three times, as the Poles do, though I took mine all on the mouth and not on the cheek—vodka, Chopin, from the freezer. I have been rereading of Pan Zagloba and his amazing exploits alcoholic in Ogniem i mieczem, of gorhalka (which I interpret to mean “grain alcohol”) and of Troyniak (“mead”). One year behind me. I have so far to go.

Last Class

Last class last week. Final upcoming. A long, cold semester closes out. At year’s end, we’ve finished 15 of the 30 chapters in Swan’s First-Year Polish. Students of the early 80s must have been twice the students we are now. Wait a minute, that would have been me!

Over the course of this semester, I managed to ace my quizzes, but as I review for the final exam and retake them, hiding the answers and corrections under a note card, I’m either overly tentative or absolutely sure on every question, then dismally mistaken in both cases. How can that be? Knowledge as kittens ambient in my short term memory but now grown up and bored and wandered off. I can’t even honestly say, “I used to know that,” I can only say, “I got that right on my quiz back then” and “That’s vaguely familiar.” Just over forty eight hours, then school’s...out... for...sum..ma.

Supplemental vocabulary for this weekend: mlecz (“dandelion”), bez (“lilac”), kardynal and rudzik (“robin”).

Wiosna w Minnesocie

Gray and cold with strong, chilling winds this first of May, jeden maju, so unspringlike as to keep me adesk with the Kosciuszko dictionary. I’m perusing A in search of adjectives and adverbs. Some champions of prose insist upon a style with a minimum of description, as if quality admitted no nuance, no shading of nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates by such modifiers. Say “yes” when you mean “yes” and “no “ when you mean “no.” Modification is for amateurs. So be criticism—I love adjectives and adverbs. To me, little in this life appears clean and unqualified, and I prefer to rag in detail, not infinitely, of course, about life’s and language’s still freshly ragged edges, deft tones, and hues evanescent.

Through A I copy, tally, and notice among ninety adjectives and adjective/adverb pairs a preponderance of cognates: absolutny, abstrakcyjny, absurdalny, adekwatny, administracyjny, afirmatywny …. Sweet. Finally, something about the language that doesn’t push complexity to the nth degree. And, not unlike English, the adverb forms are pretty regular and recognizable; absolutnie, absurdalnie, agresywnie, aktualnie, aktywnie, and even more sweetly, adverbs don’t decline like adjectives. They’re always the same. Some tricks, to be sure, must attend to finding and fastening the appropriate ending to an adjective—ny, yjny, alny, czny, wny—but the challenges here seem manageable. Only a few adjectives in my list do not call to mind, in due time, their English counterpart: adamowy (“stark naked”), aksamitny (“velvety”), antywojenny (“antiwar”), aspoleczny (“asocial”), and autowy (“out” as in sports’ “out-of-bounds”). Most of the cognate adjectives are imports. The less recognizable words have deeper native, Slavic roots. Except for autowy, which looks like something having to do with cars, but is, most likely, an echoic import—Out!