Impatience

It’s official. I’ve become impatient. After four semesters, term break, and the early arrival of spring, I want to be done with school and fluent in Polish. Now! Well, school will end soon enough at least.

In the interest—and the frankly baseless presumption—of fluency, I ordered and have received an untranslated anthology of Polish poetry, straightforwardly enough, Antologia Poezji Polskiej (Nobel: Warszawa, 2001). Would that the rest of the text were that straightforward.

What such impatience and presumption teach you is that while you may have a fair to middling grasp of the grammar and some meta-linguistics, your usage is halting at best, your vocabulary, laughable, pronunciation not what it should be, and your grasp of idiom still achingly wishful. True, you may manage a B for the course, perhaps even a B+, but, as you’ve always reminded your own students, grades are essentially meaningless.

Impertinent as this purchase may have been, impatience can still produce real, sometimes timely learning, as in this case, sad wisdom. It took awhile, but I found a 16^th century verse from Jan Kochanowski, the father of Polish poetry, that I could more or less comprehend—and feel.

O Tymże

Wczoraj pił z nami, a dziś go chowamy;

Ani wiem czemu tak hardzie stąpamy.

Śmierć nie zna złota i drogiej purpury,

Mknie po jednemu, jako z kojca kury. (16)

I had to look up tymże, chować, hardzie, stąpać, mknąć, and kojec (25% of the text and 50% of the key words) to come up with this translation:

“Yesterday he was drinking with us, and today we bury him;

I don’t know why we pace so proudly.

Death knows not gold and dear purple,

He steals up to one as from a chicken coop.”

Death, śmierć, “shmee-airch,” what a harsh word, what an inaugust, rodential image, that varminty rustle through the leaves, that lethal minky insouciance, mocking our dignity, our hard-won self-esteem, carrying off this week the fathers of friends, the friends of friends, and today, a rich poet, though not in gold or purple.

Ferie Wiosenne

At midterm/spring break, I’ve pulled my grade back into the B range, where I’ll be happy to close out the semester, God willing. The dative case chapter quiz won’t likely ruin me, Klasówka chyba mi nie zepsuła, and somehow I managed to get through the in-class number review and the genitive of time exercises with a minimum of embarrassment. Sometimes I almost think I’m beginning to understand. I’ve memorized the months of the year. Progress is being made with half a semester to go.

Checking my blog stats, I tally page viewers, one-time only and sporadic, from forty countries, including just recently all of the Baltic republics—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—Greece, Belgium, Hungary, and, charmingly, Trinidad & Tobago. The most curious recent point of access was from Jersey, and not the state, New Jersey, but the English Channel isle. How cool is that? So I looked into the connection, and the web authorities note that some Poles and Slavs migrated there after the failed revolutions of 1848. Poles, it would seem, are everywhere—though I have no chance readers yet from China or Africa. Otherwise, I enjoy occasional and undeserved attention from a significant portion of the world’s landmass. Which is as attention should be in my case. Professor Davies reminds me that “Almost one-third of all ethnic Poles live abroad.” (II, 275) The Trinidadian Poles! Witamy!

And my ciupaga arrived this week. A ciupaga is a highland shepherd’s ax, a kind of a cross between a shephard’s staff and a hatchet, which has been further modified these days into a kind of hiking-walking stick/tomahawk. A serious cudgel, nevertheless, a bludgeon with an edge. In volume II of Potop, a pack of Tatra highlanders save King Jan Kazimierz from a column of Swedish cavalry. The work of those “vengeful axes” was complete and not pretty. I hope to use mine exclusively for hiking, but it’s good to know that one can bring down an invader and an occupier with it in a pinch.    

Paszport

The new passport arrived last week, the third edition of my little blue book of international memories and futures. My old passport returned this week in a separate envelope. Curious, two mailings, but pretty darn quick service, I dare say. Government works, at least the State Department.

I contemplate three faces over thirty years, a moustache on each. The first sports a light isosceles smudge, somewhat asymmetrical, on a face in search of symmetry, with a cheesy fringe of beard adding to its youth, presumption and cluelessness. Note: I did, briefly, have hair.  At forty, I wore mid-face a solid wedge of masculinity, but without ostensible national political association. Under the auspices of this particular look, I made my first trip to Poland.  Two later trips  I traveled essentially shorn. My current face brandishes its Polish moustache(s)—plural in the Polish—brushes now dense enough to thatch a Kashubian roof. It will serve as my visa.

I read this month of an organization in the United States calling itself the American Mustache Institute and promoting a “million mustache march” in April, as well as legislation, including tax breaks, in support of hairier faces. We are a silly people sometimes, extolling the economic benefits of mustache cultivation with hardly a word about the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic benefits. The Poles wrote poetry on the subject: Franciszek Dionizy Kniaznin. (See “Twirling moustaches and equestrian statuary: Polish semiotics in Conrad’s ‘Nostromo,” Jean Szczypien, Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 28, 1995) Now to find Kniaznin’s texts.