Life in Other Words

I’ve decommissioned the comment option of this blog on the premise that the author ought to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and articulate feature of his own site. And so, I have excommunicated my lovelier commentariat for their lively and insightful violations of this second fundament of writing: narcissism. This stricture has the added value of keeping my attention focused on the evolutions of my own mind under the influence of Polish acculturation. Heaven knows I have had a hard enough time keeping up with the docile creatures that tentatively emerge from the warrens of my intellect and limited imagination (wyobraznia); following the young, nimble half-wild rabbits (kroliky) of suggestion released by others, and those rabbits bred for racing, would simply lead me to exhaustion.

But I will address the most recent comment/suggestion. In response to my penultimate post, in which I observed and lamented the time required for learning a language—learning anything seriously, I dare say—a veteran and accomplished educator, seconded by an uncommonly astute student, suggested that I should see my entire life, every waking hour, as an opportunity to improve my Polish. (Our instructor has additionally suggested we sleep with our books under our pillows.) While it may be the best way of studying a language short of immersing oneself entirely in the culture by moving to Poland, immersing one’s daily life in the words is certainly not an effective way to limit one’s time in acquiring mastery. Quite the opposite. The university recommends that for a 5-credit course like Beginning Polish, a student should expend at least 15 hours per week in study, which I believe I do—in class and in blocs of study throughout the week. Subtracting the 3.5 hours of class time, I should be devoting 11.5 hours of homework per week. Immersing my self in the words would easily absorb the remaining 67 hours of discretionary time: the rest of my life would be homework.

I ventured a little experiment last week after receiving this recommendation and tried, Adamlike in the Polish Garden of Eden, to note and name all of the nouns on my bike ride to work: drzewo (tree), more specifically jesion (ash), klon (maple), brzoza (birch: former cabinet secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski’s name derives from this word), ulica (street), autobus, samochod (car), skrzyzowacasie (crossing), swiatla regulujace ruch uliczny (traffic lights), and, of course, rower (bicycle). It took me awhile to look these up, write them down, and put them to memory. And I still don’t know exactly how to pronounce skrzyzowacasie. Then I thought about all the other nouns I would have to look up on my three-mile ride to work. And not all of them would be in my little $10 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary. Our syllabus recommends Stanislawski’s Wielki Slownik Angielsko-Polski (The Great English-Polish Dictionary), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo (publishing house) Philip Wilson, 1999. There is a 2-volume and a 4-volume edition, @ $180.00—200,000 word and phrase entries. So if, in addition to my normal 15 hours of study a week, I immersed my remaining 67 hours per week in Polish words at the optimistic rate of 25 words/entries per hour, I’d be through Stanislawski in two and a half years. Which returns me to my lament.

Hearsay

A few days ago I ran into a former squash colleague of mine, Herr Doktor A_W_, a small-animal veterinarian and a German, now, happily expatriated. Neither of us having been active on the courts for a couple of years, he asked what I was up to. “Polish,” I said and provided a bit of background on this less strenuous pastime in response to his interrogation. A euroskeptic smile underlined his curiosity as he related his most recent experience with members of the Polish national persuasion. In the not too distant past, a veterinary colleague of his had arranged for a professional vet student exchange with some institution in Poland; and my countrymen-to-be, it seems, comported themselves with less than perfect civility. The good doctor recalled the group as a male-dominated, sexist pecking order whose primary objective was getting laid. We did not have time to suss the unsavory details, but in going our separate ways, he granted that they might not be representative of Polish society as a whole. Or they may well have been, just as they might represent patriarchy and western civilization generally, and quite possibly the veterinary profession. To my mind, a preoccupation with sex and the social order would seem as natural to Polish primates as to German and American primates, as well as to the smaller mammals that A_W_, V.M.D. would treat regularly.

I was more interested in his use of the word “hierarchy,” as if even in informal social settings in a completely different country, a clear, conscious regimentation applied in Polish groups. In demotic America, “hierarchy” is something of a dirty word, but I have noticed the concept and the word used much more comfortably in a Polish cultural context. The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote that “in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is mandatory.” Rank matters, even among peers. Poland’s most recent poet of Nobel stature, Wislawa Szymborska, we learn, falls visibly short of Milosz’s achievement, though she’s “very good.” Some are more equal than others. (I like her better, at least in translation.) In the life of the body and the body politic, a similar traditional attitude seems to persist. The spirit of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility, a class more or less exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, could well continue to stickle in Polish social life. The Church, the military, and the university, all visibly stratified orders, remain important social institutions. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Poles might favor “hierarchy,” though it might to Herr W_ that I, an American, acknowledge its attraction. Not averse to hierarchies myself, I prefer them loose and voluntary.

Not So Keen A __________________ (fill in the blank)

The early quiz and homework returns indicate that I haven’t lost my knack for getting good grades. But after thirty years at university, I know the difference between getting good grades and actually learning the material. Not that I am not learning Polish. One cannot encounter so fresh and osmotic a subject and not absorb significant amounts at the outset, only that I’m all too aware of what I don’t know and should know after five weeks—and could know if I worked harder: hard and soft consonants, what exactly voicing and devoicing is, and the rules for devoicing. Our instructor provides explanations in a linguistic jargon not less difficult than Polish itself. These “rules” do not help me express. They seem descriptive, analytic, not the kind of formulae by which one naturally generates discourse. In first language acquisition, we more or less learn these rules practically by ear and use, then take grammar exams on them in eighth grade, exams which have little impact on the average person’s competency, thankfully. In second language learning, at least in the academy, such linguistic scaffolding remains primary to pedagogy. And so, one can earn As without necessarily feeling any intimations of fluency. In time, our instructor assures us, in time.


And it is time, time on task, drill time, practice time, listening time—time that accounts for whatever progress I have made so far and exhibited in quiz and homework. I have no gift, no genius for foreign languages; I grind. When I am called upon to recite in class, perhaps half of those times I have drawn, immediately, a complete blank, and made that embarrassing excursus to dithering lexical incompetence—the kind that characterized George W. Bush at a press conference. This brain infarct, initially cognitive, is not becoming; it engenders embarrassment, which further compounds the hesitation. Affect affects effect. Sometimes I emerge from that foggy thicket, the path spontaneously and inexplicably opened in my mind ex nihilo, like the universe; sometimes I simply guess and grope to success; sometimes the instructor graciously moves on to another student, who provides an answer I knew but simply could not produce. Professor Polakiewicz has wisely not attempted to coax right answers out of me. When I’m wrong, I seem to benefit somewhat from stewing in error, tamten not tento—which is not even a word, only a misguided construction. If there were time, I could learn Polish best by making every possible language mistake in the book, but I suspect that the possible mistakes are infinite and time, not.

Student

The Polish word for “student” is student. If only the rest were that simple. As I noted in an earlier post, Polish is a heavily inflected language, which means that nouns take different endings depending on how they are used in a sentence, that is, according to their case. In the nominative case, let’s say, as the subject of a sentence, “That student seems a little bit old to be taking a first semester language class,” we’d use the Polish form student. When we wish to indicate possession, ownership, “The utter confusion of that student,” we’d use the genitive case, here the Polish form studenta. The dative case, indicating the recipient of an action (a.k.a. the indirect object), would appear in a Polish sentence as follows: “The generous instructor gave studentowi the benefit of the doubt.” In the accusative, where the noun serves as the direct object (the complement of a transitive verb), we find “the generous instructor passing the old studenta, though with some reservation.” (An observant reader will note that the genitive and the accusative forms of this word are the same. Hmm.) These four cases are generally recognized in English grammar, but only the genitive has a different form: student, student’s, student, student.


In Polish, there are three more cases: instrumental, locative, and vocative. The instrumental shows means or agency. That is, if a seasoned instructor corrected an older student’s (studenta) error by means of a younger student, that younger student, if male, would be referred to as studentem. (I have no idea whether such a sentence would be in any way idiomatic in Polish. Hard to make it so in English—this is purely hypothetical.) Then there’s the locative, which appears after prepositions of location: “in” the student, “on” the student, “about” the student, “next to” the student, and “after” the student would all render the student, in Polish, studentcie. Finally, if one were to invoke a student, in joy or despair, one would cry out, “Oh, studentcie!”

Thus, seven case forms to remember for any noun. Oh, and the case forms are different for feminine nouns: studentka, studentki, studentce, studentke, studentka, studentce, and studentko. And for plurals: studenci, studentow, studentom, studentow, studentami, studentach. Much to remember then, and quickly please, including grammar terms (transitive/intransitive) which an old English major has long since forgotten, along with many umbrellas, keys, anniversaries, birthdates, and the names of any number of schoolmates. [I do recall my children’s names: "Hey, Stefan (Stefanie), Hey, Zoe (Zosiu)! Love you."] Why must language be so complicated? Because life, which language reflects, tries to capture, is complicated, and if you think about it, even more so than language. Which is why we also have silence—baffled, stunned, complete silence—a reverent WTF! a kind of non-utterance, the perfect uneffing of the ineffable.

Pan Steve

More than one of my readers, that is to say, two of my readers (40% of my known readership) have expressed a preference for more postings and a lighter touch. I don’t take all readers seriously, but these two I do because one is beautiful and the other my oldest friend. Beauty and friendship are among the most serious of recommendations.


But at the same time, one has to be true to oneself and to the subject of one’s blog, in this case, Polishness. As Professor Polakiewicz has reminded us on more than one occasion in only three classes to date, the Poles are an exceedingly “polite” people. The language, like many languages, has two forms of the singular pronoun “you,” a formal you-form and a familiar you-form. In Polish, the formal you form, pan (masculine) and pani (feminine), would seem to dominate social discourse. Our instructor’s mother, for example, and her best friend of many decades, who love one another like sisters, still address one another as pani.

A small thing, you might think, but this social practice has wider implications. It suggests that Poles exhibit reserve, circumspection, formalities. No one would mistake Polish culture for Mediterranean, Caribbean, or Oceanic. It is not, at least immediately, warm. Neither is it cold, but emanates rather a decorous lukewarmth. Poles are Old School, or at least, Polakiewicz is Old School. Even after many years teaching in this country, he wears a jacket and tie. Though jacketless, I’m in the habit of wearing a button-down Oxford and cravat, a habit deriving, perhaps, from some residual ethno-genetic or epigenetic aversion to the public casual. Never a T- or polo shirt at work for me. So that the freedom and informality that normally and rightfully characterizes a typical blog might not quite fit this one. Or perhaps, this social distance and seriousness are historical, generational accidents. I suppose we’ll see. Panie Stefanie, I’ll keep you posted.

First Class

I took my seat in class as a student for the first time in twenty years: Beginning Polish. And so it has begun, in earnest. Not the oldest of his classmates, BorOvich, Josh (spelled phonetically Dzos in Polish) entered and sited himself in the second row, extreme right, by the door. I felt neither trepidation nor comfort, and the natural excitement of learning only came with time, as the instructor divulged tidbits about the Slavic language family. Russian is the most musical, owing to its separating all consonantal sounds with vowels; words never grind to an unpronounceable (or visual) halt against the twisted wire of barbarous consonant clusters like chrz, szcz, prz, scdz, and trz—or fail to start at all. Not true of Polish. Interestingly, Serbo-Croatian is essentially the same language spoken, but it is written in a Cyrillic and a Roman script respectively, demarcating the religious lines, Greek Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat), that divide the population of speakers. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody “cleansing” of Balkan ethnicities, Serbian and Croatian present politically as separate languages (roll eyes here; yet another people, like the English and Americans, separated by a common language). Kasubian, a tongue with Pomeranian influences, aspires to the status of a separate language and not a mere dialect of Polish. Linguists, including our instructor, are not unsympathetic to their claims, which must ultimately be decided by the United Nations. As for Polish, our instructor notes, it is simply one of the more difficult of foreign languages for English speakers.

Among the difficulties—pretty much true of all Slavic languages—is that Polish is highly inflected; it distinguishes seven grammatical cases, whereas English and German manage to get by with three or four: nominative, accusative/dative, and genitive, that is, a subject form (“I”), an object form, direct and indirect in English (“me”), and a possessive form (“my”). The Poles, like other Slavs and the ancient Romans, add three more: a vocative, an instrumental, and a locative. When I signed up, I was aware that Polish was more or less doubly inflective, and could consequently, unlike English and German, have a highly variable sentence word order. (As well as having “different words for everything,” as Steve Martin has so perspicuously observed of French.) But on that first day, we were introduced as well to pronunciation “rules” about the voicing and devoicing of consonants, depending on the vowel sound that follows or its position in the word. The letter “b,” for example, often sounds as an English “b,” but in the presence of other letters is devoiced to sound like an English “p.” Now, Polish has a letter “p” that sounds like the English letter “p,” so why not write the sound with a single letter? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Who made these “rules,” by the way, and were they vodka-influenced? When our instructor alluded to verb aspect, which we will take up later, my head began to spin.

There are very good reasons, of course, for the bewildering complexity and the seeming irrationalities of all languages (think “knight,” “night,” and “ignite” in English; “there,” “their,” and “they’re”). At least, those reasons seem good and natural and obvious (but unconsciously so) for speakers viewing the language from within. To those on the outside learning it, they’re, well, crazy, okay, maybe not crazy, but weird, or, well, you know, kinda arbitrary. Which they are, at one level; all language derives from an absolutely arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon association between signs (sounds/written words) and things. We agree upon them in time, and we agree upon the changes over time. Language, like life and love, perhaps, is history—a metaphor I’ve been pondering.

A new language is like a new love, fresh, compelling, demanding, complex, and seemingly impossible, especially to a man over fifty. A knowledge of linguistics, like the knowledge of women and love generally, helps, but not nearly enough. A knowledge of other foreign languages, like the experience of other lovers, helps as well, some, but anyone who has ever applied an amorous principle, practice, or trick extramurally can attest to its potential for disaster. The rule for devoicing consonants in Polish proceeds from right to left, in Russian, from left to right (or vice versa, let me double check.) Every language then, like every woman, has an experience of its own, and a logic and coherence deriving exclusively from the interactions of the lives of its speakers in their world. Understanding, mastery require patience, attention, commitment, time, and work, maybe a lifetime thereof, or the rest of a lifetime.

unAmerican

A resolve to become Polish suggests some dissatisfaction with America, being American. After fifty years of having been, I must cop to a certain, even a radical, discontent. A distinct and elemental and unyielding exasperation, though not, in the end, a disabling one. I like my country well enough. It has its moments and special places. But America has always loomed too large and just too much generally for me to love with any kind of intimacy or enthusiasm. I myself am not large, and while I have been known to contradict myself, I do not contain multitudes. The exuberant, the omniveros, the generous Walt Whitman sang a patriotism far too expansive for me. I prefer the paean of a more central American, that of Jose Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican.


I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (and I know it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, castles,
a rundown city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).

Which is not to say that I hate my country or regret my being and having been an American, I don’t. Rather, one comes to understand that the fullness of life, the fullness of being human, perhaps even a full understanding of being American, may require more than a single national experience. (How many such fullness may require, I do not know, only that I have to get started.) Something about small countries attracts me, the limitedness of non-superpowers, of subject states, underdogs, lost causes, even of the defeated, and this style of patriotism, which Pacheco slyly names “High Treason.”