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.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
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.”
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.”
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Embers in the Steppe
Finished Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe Wednesday and feel only slightly more Polish—a little tired, a little defeated, a little melancholy—as if one had actually campaigned against the Turks but seen little action: it’s a long, fairly flat read of the epic sort. One book jacket reviewer claims that “If you are going to read only one literary work in your life about Poland, read Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy.” Perhaps, but if you are that reader, I recommend you read it when you are a boy. Parts of this third volume would make a reasonably salable video game, that is to say, a ripping good bloodbath, but the book as a whole and the love story dominating it are less satisfactory.
One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.
Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.
One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.
But it was too late for realizations and regrets. Lusnia stooped down, grasped Azia by the hips so that he’d be able to move them back and forth, in much the way that a seamstress moved the eye of a needle she is about to thread, and barked an order at the men who held the waiting horses.
“Move out! Slowly and together!”
The horses started forward. The ropes tightened and pulled on Azia’s legs. His body slid along the ground for barely a moment before it struck the crudely sharpened point of the young, felled tree. [It gets rather graphic here, page 602-3 for the less squeamish among you.]
“Slowly!” the sergeant growled.[The stake is raised and imbedded in the ground.]
Azia looked down upon all this from his dreadful height. He was fully conscious. This form of execution, which came to the Commonwealth from Valachia a long time before, was all the more dreadful because an impaled victim sometimes lived as long as three days.[Then it gets worse before Sienkiewicz finally ignites him.]
Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Fire in the Steppe
Looking for a beach read in a second-hand bookstore, I found instead Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe, the third fat volume (700 pages) in his heavy trilogy of the Polish national experience in the mid 1600s. While never actually cracking it on the beach (too much sand, too much sun, too much wind, too much surf—how do people actually manage to read on the beach?) I did make it through the first 200 pages in the air-conditioned beach house. On page 199 you can read, “A foreigner is always just a stepson in any other country, but our good Motherland [Poland] will stretch her arms to him and hug him to her breast from the start.”
These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.
But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.
These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.
But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Beginning Polish
This afternoon I enrolled in Beginning Polish at the university. While not usually the first step to becoming Polish, learning the language is without doubt the longest, hardest, and most important of slogs. Language bears and impresses more culture per unit effort than any other ethnomorphic activity. At the very least, if you can talk the talk, you’ve walked a good deal of the walk.
Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.
Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Becoming Polakiem
You will no doubt have noticed the eight day delay between when I first decided to blog—unfortunate word, really, “blog”: from “blahblahblah” + “fog”—and my first post. A number of reasons account for the delay. First, having overcome a shyness to publication of any kind, I had to learn the basics of the contemporary push-button vanity press. Amazingly simple as it has turned out to be, still, cognitive and psychological hurdles had to be overcome in the process. Though by no means a Luddite, nor am I an early adopter of any technology. I seem to have proven, however, sufficiently techno-savvy and surprisingly vain.
The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.
After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.
Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.
The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.
After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.
Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.
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