Verbs of Motion

In August of 2004, I hiked to the summit of Mount Giewont in the Tatras and took this picture, breathless, knowing I would return one day and walk this very path. Time passes, breath returns, and while I haven’t, the foreknowledge of my return remains certain. However, the knowledge of Polish verbs of motion that might get me there has yet to arrive. How would one even say that, in this context, in Polish? How does knowledge arrive? On foot typically, przyjść? (Close readers will note that I have discovered the symbol browser under the insert menu, where all Polish consonants have lain in patient wait for my discovering them.) By vehicle, przyjechać? Or on wing, przylecieć. Definitely on wing, I think, but is that arrival a one-time only completed action, or is it not rather a habitual or random motion, or a characteristic action requiring przylatać? If completed, wouldn’t it be the perfective, poprzylecieć? You can begin to see the conceptual problems in the Polish mind, complex and subtle, even if you can’t pronounce them, and those problems now beset me, and I have sat under in-class questioning in a blankness altogether embarrassingly complete. Professor Polakiewicz assures us, not without mischief in his voice, that the knowledge of verbs of motion will come—in twenty-five years. Maybe fifteen.

What sustains a pilgrim over the long blank hours is his vision.

The Fourth Semester

The word is out now, so generally that, at social gatherings such as one is likely to encounter over the holidays, I must relate any plans, any progress I have made in the great but ordinary adventure of becoming Polish. Fair enough. Where originally I had encountered some, not much, but some, unstated resistance to the idea—unwise, impractical, silly and impulsive (as if I’ve ever been any of those things; okay, maybe silly, once; well, it was sort of a phase)—now I receive only approval, enthusiastic support, and, of course, advice. And where auditors earlier registered a certain skeptical suspicion at the idea that I intended to leave momentarily, now a sense of impatience insinuates into the conversation. It may have been a year since they learned, and I’m still here. Perhaps Josh is all talk. (If so, he is certainly not conversationally Polish.) It may be years yet, who knows? I think I’ll leave when they least expect, when everyone has lost interest.

This week I registered for fourth semester Polish, the last of my intended academic exposures to the language and culture. After this, life and work, as it comes.

Potop

Between semesters, I’ve finished the first volume of The Deluge, or Potop, the middle blockbuster of Sienkiewicz’s trilogy.  The story of an intrepid, wayward, and none too bright Polish brigand, Pan Kmita, Sienkiewicz returns him to the paths of righteousness and true patriotism by means of his devotion to the beautiful and virtuous Olenka. Cloyingly conventional as its plot and plot devices, Potop’s eight hundred pages do rouse the Polish blood of this belle-lettrist, currently in the throes of grammar-induced anemia. (Use the instrumental case of gramatyka here.) At the halfway point in the novel, in Czestochowa, on the walls of the monastery at Jasna Gora, we’re holding off the damn Swedes with artillery, chorale music, and divine intervention—or witchcraft, depending on your denominational point of view.

Less bloody than Ogniem i mieczim, Sienkiewicz pays that much more attention to Polish moustaches, full, heavy, dangling even to the chest, which are tugged upon, chewed, bit down upon, twirled—but not twisted upward, which is a “sly vanity” and a foreign affectation. (84) Invading are the damned Swedes with their “upturned yellow mustache combed out at the ends into a pair of stiff outspread military brushes” (214, 284) or their “flared Reiter” (725) and their pointed chin whiskers; committing treason, the nietszchean dandy Prince Boguslav Radziwill with his “soft, pouting mouth seem[ing] particularly childish under the delicate little mustache” (514), thin and penciled “like a silken fringe.” (696) Or the German Ganhof, with whose “ragged, upswept mustache [he] looked the embodiment of darkness.” (697) The raised wings of moustache betoken an imperial court, not a noble republic.

Not that a single moustache type defines true Poles or Polishness. Pan Sapyeha, the faithful Hetman of this volume, “wore his greying mustache clipped short above his lip which, along with his pointed little beard, made him look somewhat like a foreigner, but he dressed in the robes and costume of a Polish noble.” (678) Rather, the “Polish” wasy are a distinctive national, but not a rigidly uniform, style: natural and abundant, but not wildly shaggy; cultivated and groomed, but not to the point of effeminacy; falling, draping elegantly down, like a bow, like honest defeat, nobly won. Mine begins to approach that ideal, inch by inch.