Paper Scratchers

Finished the second volume of Potop (“The Deluge”) Wednesday night—when I should have been reviewing my grammar—1500 pages of war, royal politics, and diplomatic intrigue, concluding with marriage to a wise and virtuous woman: “He was not ashamed of that, however, but acknowledged himself that in every important affair he sought her advice.” The closing words are good counsel for impetuous men. As With Fire and Sword, The Deluge ends happily with the marriage of the long-suffering soldier-hero, Pan Andrei Kmita. Domestic bliss is a good way for even less impetuous men to close 3500 pages of bloody epic fiction. Of course, I have read the trilogy as I have managed to find the books in used-book stores, which is to say, out of order. Sienkiewicz intended Polish history, and perhaps life itself, to be read otherwise, on a heroic down note, with the funeral of Michał Wolodyjowski, the great but diminutive colonel, the master saber-swordsman of all Poland.

The runt myself of a semi-Polish litter and briefly a student of the saber (though in my case, not the bent battle version, quite nasty, but the whippy, stylized fencing edition), I identify most with this tireless, plucky cavalier, small, dapper, dutiful, romantically clumsy, a beautiful loser and eventual cadaver.  Over thirty years ago I was routinely cut to ribbons on the strip by Don and Bart and Woz and Simoon Oo (what a fabulous name!) but lived to quit, after only four months of incessant beweltering, and tell about it. I am no cavalier. And while Michał faced Cossacks, Tartars, witches, Russians, Swedes, and Turks, I face, this week, only the Dative Case. Ink runs in my veins not blood, atrament nie krew. And as Pan Zagloba has so rightly observed, “those paper scratchers are the lowest kind of man on earth.” (252) So, though a lesser being, a much lesser being (I don't even scratch, I key), I will have a story. Not sure that’s a good thing.

No Love

Class yesterday fell on Valentine’s Day, and but though I have spent now thousands (okay, two thousands) of dollars and no little time and energy in pursuit, I got no love from the language last night. A C- on the quiz of verbs of motion, the first big evaluation of the term. And this semester, I’ve had more time for study, which I have used, but so far, to little apparent avail. True, last week’s mini-quiz on body parts and articles of clothing, a hundred words, I did ace, missing only the fine distinction between adidasy  (“athletic shoes”) and tenisówki (“tennis shoes”), which, in my defense, was ill rendered by the illustrations we were required to label. But nouns are straightforward—adjectives, too, pretty much—persons, places, things, like a body, ciało, pierś (“woman’s bosom”), biodro (“hip”), udo (“thigh”), pośladki (“derrière,” which sounds so much better in French), the somewhat vulgar krocze, and the more delicate majtki (“women’s briefs”). Nouns are the physical of a language, the matter, the sex; verbs are the love, movement and spirit. I’ve been a reasonably keen student of the former, but the latter, so nuanced, so elusive, I’ve not, what’s the word….  

Future Perfect

Been steadily at my Polish. From verbs of motion—determinate and indeterminate—we move once more to tense and aspect: the future tense of perfective verbs. Perfective verbs, you will recall, denote completed action, so that had you actually recalled what perfective verbs denote, we would use a perfective verb, in this case, probably zapamiętać, the perfective form of pamiętać, “to remember.” If you were trying, struggling to remember, we would use pamiętać. Good for you, though! Success! “You recalled” or “you have recalled” would be rendered zapamiętałeś or zapamiętałaś, depending on your gender because, as you recall, Polish verbs agree in number and gender in the past and future tense, but not in the present tense. If you are in the present tense process of remembering, it would simply be pamiętasz. “you remember” or “you are remembering,” regardless of guyness, girlness, or neutrality.

The future tense for perfective verbs gets a little tricky because it looks very much like the present tense form of imperfective verbs. You see, perfective verbs have no present tense. One can have perfected something in the past tense, and one can project into the future—and thus into the future tense—the completion of an action, “I will remember.” (In English, the perfective form shall has fallen somewhat into disuse. We now use expletives and emphases to communicate the certainty of future completion, “I will remember, dammit!”) But, leaving the quantum physics and metaphysics aside, one cannot complete and be in the process of completing an action at the same instant—at least grammatically. Therefore, no present tense for perfective verbs. For the future perfective in Polish, we use, for example, zapamiętam. The problem, of course, to a second language learner is that unless one already knows that the verb is perfective (and we usually don’t, at first anyway), one reads it as a present tense form, not future. It looks like a verb having something vaguely to do with remembering in the present tense, not the perfective “I will remember and complete the remembering at some specific point in the future.” From the standpoint of economizing on conjugational forms, it makes a certain amount of sense to use present tense seeming forms for verbs that cannot have a present tense, but it’s a little confusing. Little, if anything, in Polish is simple and transparent, as if the language were not so much encoded as encrypted.

I sent in my application for passport renewal today. Past perfective.

Requiescat

The headline this evening: “Poland’s 1996 Nobel Poet Szymborska Dies at 88.”

Why do the good ones have to die?
(ans.: We all die, good and bad.)

Brain tumors, lung cancer, old age,

Suicide.

Why can’t they write forever?
(ans.: See above.)

How do the bad poets manage to thrive?
(ans.: There is no answer.)

They should write instead

Survival manuals for the good.
Niech pani papierosy pali--tak wiele.

Dobranoc, Pani Wisławo.