Friday, July 26, 2013

Długosz

Having been back now almost a month, I’ve resumed American life in all of its outward manifestation and return to the inward Polishness of reading and private language study and subtle Slavic signage—a lapel pin, a stud of silver eagle from the Polish mint. At home, I boil up some roasted kasza and crush the pebbly half-grains, al dente, under my molars for lunch, a good soft crush that tastes of the field and smells of prehistory. I smoke small bowls of Poniatowski in the backyard on the weekends; short, little personal campfires in my mouth. Ogniem i tytońem. I’ve repeatedly answered the query “How was Poland?” with “Fabulous” and imagine my next visits. When? I do not know.

For now, I read Jan Długosz, excerpts from his Roczniki (“The Annals”), which I ordered from the university library in one heavy black flagstone of a book. The 15th –century cleric and royal functionary, Poland’s first “historian,” Father Jan wrote in Latin, but this translation is from the Polish, eleven parchment colored volumes which stood on a high shelf in the bookstore round the corner on Piłsudskiego in Kraków. Oh, I coveted them, covet them still, as well as the Polish necessary to read them as easily I do this English abridgement.

Długosz’s entries, year by year, present like extravagant lab notes to Steven Pinker’s theory on violence, or Davies’s terse thesis  that “War was the natural condition of medieval society” (I, 80):

A.D. 970 Sviatoslav, the Ruthenian [Ukrainian] prince, apparently dissatisfied with the lands he has inherited from his father, starts a war against his neighbours, the Bulgarians….

[Two years later]
Sviatoslav finally returns from his incursion into Bulgaria in possession of considerable booty. However, his homeward progress is barred by a large force of Petchenegs, which easily defeats him, either because his army is overburdened by booty or because the site in which he chooses to do battle is unfavourable. He, himself, in trying to make his men stand firm and so prevent a shameful rout, falls into the hands of his enemies, whose leader, Kura, has Sviatoslav’s head severed and made into a goblet, ornamented with gold, from which he, Kura, drinks a daily toast to his triumph. (3)
I’m partial to both Długosz’s form—historical fact, meditation upon it, moralysis, though I prefer a less explicitly Christian take—and his voice, sage and sardonic, sometimes, perversely understated:

Bohemia loses its king, Boleslav, he who had been blinded by order of the Polish king, Bołeslaw [sic]. Another death is that of the King’s son, Oldřich, to whom Polish Bolesław had restored his freedom. This leaves Jaromír, who has also been blinded on the orders of his own brother, Oldřich, and is thus unable to rule. Instead, he places on the throne his own nephew, Břetislav, Oldřich’s son by Božena, whom he strictly enjoins to make sure that he exterminates the treacherous family of Vršovci, at whose suggestion both he and his father had been blinded. One member of this family, Kochan, incensed by the implied insult and finding himself in a strategic position behind Jaromír as the latter is attending to a call of Nature, runs him through with a sharp spear. Thus, in one year, Boleslav, King of Bohemia, and his two sons are killed; while the Queen of Poland and her young son are sent into exile. It is not a happy year for the ruling houses of these two countries. (28)
The good old days. In these less sanguinary times, I return from foreign adventures to the books.