Sunday, February 27, 2011

Fire and Sword

We spent the entire last class viewing With Fire and Sword (1999), a three-hour cinematic rendition, with subtitles (yay!), of Sienkiewicz’s epic and not infrequently ferocious novel—Ogniem i Mieczem in Polish. Thankfully no Mel Gibson, the director, Jerzy Hoffman, working in a visual medium, wisely played down the blood-letting, its scale at any rate, and referred to, but did not dwell upon, the specific instances of extreme and prurient brutality, such as the impalement of Chmielnytski’s envoy or the sacking of the fortress at Bar. True, Longinus Podbipienta’s triple decapitation of castle-scaling Turks did receive appropriate graphic attention, but the special effects left a little to be desired. Though I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed even a single decapitation in real life, the streaming of the gore and the trajectory of those unfortunate heads—odd upward bounce—struck me as a bit, hmm …. cartoonish. Earlier, hiding in a barn loft, Pan Zagloba had split the skull, vertically, of a Cossack with a much grimmer realism than Podbipienta’s horizontal sword stroke. On the whole, however, we viewers seem to have avoided the bloodbath that the Poles and Cossacks did not manage to avoid in the mid 1600s, though as I recall now, there were rather a lot of hangings.

The love story between the noble Polish soldier, Pan Jan, and Helena, a Ruthenian border beauty, frames and interlards the war story. The romance, which, we have to remember, was written over a hundred years ago, plays along conventional lines. Physically quite nice to look at (a former Bond Girl, ranked 7th and 17th for beauty and sexiness in the 007 series, according to Wikipedia), Helena was otherwise constrained and passive, chaste and always pretty fully clothed. For a brief moment, when the witch Horpyna inserted her tongue into Helena’s ear, a genuine opportunity arose to complicate the romantic line; but Hoffman took fewer liberties with Sienkiewicz than Sienkiewicz took with history, leaving the possibility of a remake open in twenty years or so—the polymorphous, holograph edition with scentsaround.

Ogniem i Mieczem is, after all, volume one of the Polish national epic, written “to uplift the hearts” of Sienkiewicz’s countrymen at a time when Poland had ceased to exist as a state. His myth-making helped to preserve and consolidate that national memory, so a Polish film-maker cannot trifle with that legacy. Poles take their Nobel Laureates and their national memory very seriously. I don’t know yet whether privately they engage in irony and irreverence—two notorious character traits of mine—but that might be for younger, shallower, more insulated and triumphal cultures.

I give two thumbs way up for the costume, particularly the hats, and the hair styles, particularly the top knots, the queues, the braids, the crests and the long, dangly moustaches: steppe-warrior hair. Pan Zagloba sports a fairly luxuriant red jar head. Pan Longinus is shaved, but with long, white, combed-out chin locks. Cossacks adorned their faces with magnificently wrecked handlebars. The vodka had to dribble off something. Knaz Jarema Wisnowiecki, the scourge of the Cossacks, wore a full mane, long and dark, like some Yanni from hell. It’s a great look it if weren’t for all the killing and dying. And the head wear was awesome, much fur, feather, and jewelry. Whether or not any animals perished in the making of this movie, many did in its haberdashery.

And now, back to the grammar, I guess.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Mourners

This past weekend, I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. The Mourners is a series of small alabaster sculptures, most of them Carthusian monks, in various postures of bereavement, from the ambiently distressed, to the moonily melancholic, to the tombly ceremonious, to the quartzly content. The monks drape in robe and cowl, a tour de force of fold, with those mourners completely covered most affecting. Heads bowed, anonymous, their hoods like some great truncated probosces, they present as an image of death, but not death the grim reaper; rather fraternal death, brother death, necessary and inevitable, but perhaps clumsy, untimely and unintentional death as well. As if death had gotten a bad rap and were all too conscious of his image as the rapacious monster of life; and here, with a book instead of a scythe, he walks with us in somber, quiet, chagrined solidarity. Cowls number 51, 52, and 53 shed tears and wring hands; 59, 61, 72, 77, and 78 flash a bit of cheek, beard, or even full face in deep recess, revealing shadowy individuality but namelessness as well. What has this exhibit to do with Poland? Almost nothing.

The printed illustrated catalog, of course, in these post-modern times, emphasizes how these artifacts display the wealth and power of the Dukes of Burgundy, how the lavish ritual of their funerals and the sumptuousness of their ducal seat and final resting place in Dijon were intended to establish their primacy in the imagination of their people and their guests. Aristocratic propaganda. Only secondarily, even as an afterthought, an epiphenomenon, do these displays express beauty and genuine emotion. Sad in its way, but true enough. For the powers that be and would be, art has predominantly ulterior motives. Always has. But again, what does this have to do with Poland?

I’ve begun rereading Norman Davies’s history of Poland and flipped ahead to the 1370s to see if there were any connections between these ambitious Dukes of Burgundy and the end of the Piast dynasty in Poland. One almost coincidence: “From the technical point of view, their claims in the female succession were inferior to those either of Wladyslaw Bialy of Gniewkow, who was a monk in Dijon in Burgundy, or of Ziemowit III, Prince of Mazovia” (I, p. 102, my italics) That is to say, the model for one of those grieving good brothers might have been Wladyslaw. His dates put him in Dijon during the reign of Philip the Bold, the first of these Burgundian Dukes, and one under whose tomb the alabaster monks perambulate. Imagine this minor Polish duke, though in the royal line, so distraught at the death of his beloved duchesse (true fact) that he retired from life and power to the cloister to pray and mourn for the world and to express and model for us the proper attitude toward it. Such a story, of a single individual of the noblest motives, would redeem the entire exhibit, would it not? We could ignore the Dukes, John the Fearless and Philip the Good—who was probably not so good—and mourn our own mortality and that of our loved ones with these good monks and Wladyslaw. Unfortunately, further research revealed nothing of the sort. Wladyslaw has a story, and it is not uninteresting, but it is not redemptive, and has little to do with the Burgundian Dukes, though he returned to Dijon to die in 1388.

If I were a fiction writer like Henryk Siekiewicz, dramatic, romantic, alive to the pageantry of national consciousness, I could work with this, make something of Wladyslaw. But forsooth, I’m a historian, and while I believe one of those sad monks had such a story to redeem the exhibit—no. 71? (sweet hat)—I don’t know it and can’t tell it.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

B-

My essay last week earned a grade of B-. This is almost a C, a grade otherwise known as failure. And given that our instructor grades generously, well, it sobers one. But I don’t worry myself, nie martwie sie. When you are older, there is something reassuring about the truth eventually getting out.

Little else to report on my increasing Polishness—little increase that it has been. This week we watch a movie, With Fire and Sword, based on the first volume of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Polish historical trilogy. It tallies 1100 pages in book form. I’m hoping for subtitles, preferably English.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Relentless Grammar

This week we engage the accusative case. We have encountered it before and blithely ignored its challenges, but now, well into the second semester, we cannot avoid the accusative, nor the bewildering and ineluctable intricacies of case generally—and number and gender and agreement and geez

So, let’s say you want to say, “The dog bites the man.” In Polish, pies is “dog” and mezczyzna is “man,” but both of these nouns are in the nominative case, so when we decline “man” to the accusative case to indicate that as the direct object he receives the action of the verb, we would write mezczyzne, or Pies gryzie mezczyzne. Because “dog” is so obviously in the nominative case and “man” so obviously in the accusative case, word order doesn’t really matter. One could write Mezczyzne pies gryzie or Mezczyzne gryzie pies and convey the same essential action of dog biting man, though with slightly different emphases. In English, of course, our nouns don’t, as a rule, decline for case, which is usually signaled by position in a sentence and context. In the sentence, “The man bites the dog,” neither noun has changed its form, though the meaning has been reversed owing to the change of position. In Polish, this unusual occurrence would be rendered Mezczyzna gryzie psa, with “dog” being declined into the accusative case.

If that were all one had to attend to, the knowledge that a noun tricks itself out a little differently according to its function in the sentence, case would seem a little cumbersome but workable. When, however, one learns that these little trick-out endings number over a half dozen according to gender (three types of masculine: inanimate, animate, and male persons only; two types of feminine, depending on hard or soft stem endings; and two neuter, depending on stem endings) and another half dozen owing to number and the hardness and softness of stem endings, one can get a little ticked off. On my Accusative Case Endings Study Sheet, there are four columns (not counting sub-columns) and twelve rows (not counting sub-rows). Another unhelpful feature of the accusative case is that the adjectival endings are different from the noun endings. If a man bites the “new dog,” he’d bite nowego psa, not nowa psa. And if he were to bite the whole damn pack, he’d bite nowe psy. And I remind you that there are seven different cases in Polish. If they replicate the complexity of the accusative—and I’m beginning to suspect that they do—well, damn it! Damn it!

Last week I sent my first draft Polish essay to a friend in Poland for proofreading. A native speaker of Polish, and fluent in Swedish and English, she apologized for her native tongue—along with supplying numerous corrections—“There is no logic in Polish.” This is not what Professor Polakiewicz has assured us. He has assured us that Polish is precise and mathematical. You just apply the rules. At some deep linguistic level, no doubt, it is, but if that structure and logic is not readily apparent to a highly educated native speaker, I wonder how clearly it can be explained to a foreigner. There are rules, it would seem, and there are exceptions to the rules, which seem to have rules of their own, then there are genuinely ruleless exceptions you just have to memorize, and then there are idioms. True enough, it may all work like clockwork in the end, but have you ever seen the inner workings of a clock? Does one have to know how it works in order to tell the time?

On NPR this week, some reference was made to the French Education minister’s proposal that all French children study English from kindergarten. One socio-linguist—as socio-linguists are wont—deplored the proposal owing to its implied power consequences: English was being politically privileged over other foreign languages and even, subtly, French. (He deplored this proposal for his American audience in English.) The counter position, interestingly, was “not to worry,” that in the future, translation software would be so sophisticated that no one would have to learn any second languages at all. In the forehearable future, we will all speak into some device in our native tongue, where it would be translated and voiced in the auditor’s native language, who can respond in her native language for it to be translated back into ours. Problem solved, technologically, as most great political questions are solved, when they’re not solved by violence. I won’t hold my breath, and in the meantime, will study my grammar, because as my Polish friend warned, “The grammar is relentless.”

Friday, February 4, 2011

Under the Weather

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.”)