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.