Polish Dream

This morning I had my first Polish dream, marzenie. And because I am not much of a dreamer, marzyciel, that is to say, using the instrumental case, nie jestem wielkim marzycielem, it wasn’t much of a dream. It was not located in Poland. There was no Polish spoken. Instead, it was a dream rather of Polish class, in which Professor Polakiewicz returned a homework assignment to me with a grade of C-.

I have never dreamed before of C-s. And the class was much larger than my actual class, and was held outdoors, under the oak tree by Number 2 green, where were deposited in the old days the piles of sand and humus with which we treated the greens for their winter dormancy, and the seats were folding chairs, as at a picnic or a graduation, and I returned to mine with this unsatisfactory diploma, feeling a vague sense of reproof. But, on the whole, no big deal.

In reality, I had received my midterm grade report on Tuesday evening after the quiz—pretty comfortably above C- –so that if an omen, my dream was both belated and mistaken, as my dreams and dream life are wont to be. But it does raise this interesting question: if your life is routinely better than your dreams, is that a good thing?

Jak szybko

Not much progress to report during spring break week. Retrogression, perhaps, but I did not hit the beaches of the Baltic Sea (Morze Baltyckie), which would be cold at this time of year—and are never none too warm. This week, our second week back, I am completely whelmed by waves of homework, dashed and stunned and discouraged and exasperated by the complexity of this language. But not drowned yet.

I calculate the hours: @300 in, with only 9700 more to go. That, of course, assumes that one has talent and that the equation talent + 10,000 hours of practice = expertise is, in fact, accurate. We shall see. Before spring break, our last minutes of class were devoted to singing in Polish one of the few ethnic songs I remember from my childhood: Jak szybko mijaja chwile (“how quickly pass the moments”). Knowing the melody, pretty and sad, I was asked to solo, which I did, prettily and sadly: “how swiftly flows the time—the years, the days, the moments.” The years are short, no doubt, but the hours are long.

WTJ

What the jebac! Sometimes that’s all you can say.

So this week we have been learning to tell time, which means we’ve begun to learn the Polish number system. Normally, with less intricate languages, you take up counting in week one or two, along with the alphabet. Not so, and rightfully, with Polish. Were you to encounter the arcana that is Polish numeracy in “week one, the first” (jedna, pierwsza agreeing in number and gender with tygodnia, “week”) you would have any number of reasons to abandon the enterprise immediately. Our instructor, who regularly insists that Polish operates with mathematical precision, has granted that on the topic of number, well, it’s “hairy”—a term I don’t recall from algebra. The author of our textbook, Oscar Swan, in his Polish Grammar, devotes an entire chapter to its problems and nuances: “Numerals are a kind of determiner…whose declension and use are complex enough to merit special treatment.” (p. 189) Ironic that the language’s claim to a pristine mathematics founders on the subject of number. Not that languages aren’t regular and orderly; only that they are history as well, and history is a effing mess.

The number 1 is simple enough, taking regular adjectival endings depending on the gender (and, surprise! the number) of the noun: jeden (m.), jedna (f.), and jedno (n.). Jeden pies (one dog), jedna ryba (one fish), jedno zwierze (one animal). A fairly straightforward trinity of genders subsumed under a recognizable One. Oddly, there is a plural adjectival form of “one,” jedne, illogical but made grammatically necessary by certain nouns in Polish that exist only as plurals. For example, the word for “door” in Polish, drzwi, is a plural form derived, if I recall correctly, from its reference to French doors, which are double. (It might also derive from the problem of trying to pronounce what would seem to be the singular, drzw.) This complication we cannot blame on the number system itself, but on exceptional nouns, of which there are not a few. Mezczyzna and kolega, “man” and “colleague,” are masculine nouns with feminine endings; so that they take masculine modifiers, even as the words themselves decline as feminine nouns. Ergo, jeden mezczyzna and jeden kolega, not jedna mezczyzna and jedna kolega, as you might expect. But I digress.

The number 2 offers two forms, dwa (for masculine and neuter nouns) and dwie (for feminine nouns). Why the masculine and neuter are collapsed before what appears to be a feminine ending and why dwie looks not in the least feminine are not altogether clear. It’s hairy, I presume, and only gets hairier. As our text notes, “The numbers dwa/dwie, trzy [3], cztery [4] take the Nominative plural of the quantified noun…. Numbers 5 and above take the Genitive plural.” (p. 114) Fascinating. As if, at a certain point, specifically 5, number acquires a somewhat different conceptual or perceptual character. You have one dog, two cats, three kids, four parking tickets, but you have five—or more, up to 900 in Polish—of anything else. At the height of the Cold War, then President Jimmy Carter tried to negotiate reductions in nuclear stockpiles with the Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. He argued that fewer, higher quality weapons (missiles with MIRVed warheads) would be preferable to mass quantities of single, large kiloton warheads. Brezhnev replied, “Quantity has a quality all of its own,” which I thought at the time one of the wittiest and profoundest things I’d ever read—wit and profundity not being something you’d normally expect from a Central Committee Chairman. And here, he may only have been uttering a commonplace of Slavic grammar.

And how about this, though hardly the last word on the hirsute punctiliousness of Polish enumeracy: “In longer compound numerals, in principle all items are declined.” (Swan, Grammar, p. 199) That is to say, when you have a large number descriptor, 10,587 things to remember about the Polish language, the individual numbers embedded in the compound numeral—ten thousand, five hundred, eighty, and seven—all have to agree in gender and case with the thing enumerated. By illustration, Professor Polakiewicz related that once when he was teaching in Poland at Lublin, he attended a State of the University Address by the rector. In listing the university’s many achievements during the year, including numbers of students, of degrees awarded, credit hours taught, etc. etc. the rector paused, stumbled, erred, corrected, back-tracked, but eventually survived that ridiculous obstacle course of data, probably at last to considerable applause, not for the loftiness of the rhetoric, but for the mere correctness of his grammar. When the chief academic officer of a major university struggles minutes at a time with the niceties of his own language, second-language learners take heed.

p.s. One of Swan’s paragraph headings: “Five ways of saying ‘three students.’”

Staying Scottish?

With some perplexity, tinged with a little distress, I observe that my sister blog, “Becoming Polish,” has ceased publication without warning or explanation. Being a pessimist, and a dark one—but not the darkest—I fervently trust that the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy” closed not at the end of her life and times (please, please), but of her love with a Polish boy. So sorry, my dear. Polish boys can be difficult. Perhaps she simply tired of blogging, became too busy. Who can know for sure? She probably didn’t, in that short space of time, succeed in becoming Polish—but if she did, I want her secret.

Fire and Sword

We spent the entire last class viewing With Fire and Sword (1999), a three-hour cinematic rendition, with subtitles (yay!), of Sienkiewicz’s epic and not infrequently ferocious novel—Ogniem i Mieczem in Polish. Thankfully no Mel Gibson, the director, Jerzy Hoffman, working in a visual medium, wisely played down the blood-letting, its scale at any rate, and referred to, but did not dwell upon, the specific instances of extreme and prurient brutality, such as the impalement of Chmielnytski’s envoy or the sacking of the fortress at Bar. True, Longinus Podbipienta’s triple decapitation of castle-scaling Turks did receive appropriate graphic attention, but the special effects left a little to be desired. Though I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed even a single decapitation in real life, the streaming of the gore and the trajectory of those unfortunate heads—odd upward bounce—struck me as a bit, hmm …. cartoonish. Earlier, hiding in a barn loft, Pan Zagloba had split the skull, vertically, of a Cossack with a much grimmer realism than Podbipienta’s horizontal sword stroke. On the whole, however, we viewers seem to have avoided the bloodbath that the Poles and Cossacks did not manage to avoid in the mid 1600s, though as I recall now, there were rather a lot of hangings.

The love story between the noble Polish soldier, Pan Jan, and Helena, a Ruthenian border beauty, frames and interlards the war story. The romance, which, we have to remember, was written over a hundred years ago, plays along conventional lines. Physically quite nice to look at (a former Bond Girl, ranked 7th and 17th for beauty and sexiness in the 007 series, according to Wikipedia), Helena was otherwise constrained and passive, chaste and always pretty fully clothed. For a brief moment, when the witch Horpyna inserted her tongue into Helena’s ear, a genuine opportunity arose to complicate the romantic line; but Hoffman took fewer liberties with Sienkiewicz than Sienkiewicz took with history, leaving the possibility of a remake open in twenty years or so—the polymorphous, holograph edition with scentsaround.

Ogniem i Mieczem is, after all, volume one of the Polish national epic, written “to uplift the hearts” of Sienkiewicz’s countrymen at a time when Poland had ceased to exist as a state. His myth-making helped to preserve and consolidate that national memory, so a Polish film-maker cannot trifle with that legacy. Poles take their Nobel Laureates and their national memory very seriously. I don’t know yet whether privately they engage in irony and irreverence—two notorious character traits of mine—but that might be for younger, shallower, more insulated and triumphal cultures.

I give two thumbs way up for the costume, particularly the hats, and the hair styles, particularly the top knots, the queues, the braids, the crests and the long, dangly moustaches: steppe-warrior hair. Pan Zagloba sports a fairly luxuriant red jar head. Pan Longinus is shaved, but with long, white, combed-out chin locks. Cossacks adorned their faces with magnificently wrecked handlebars. The vodka had to dribble off something. Knaz Jarema Wisnowiecki, the scourge of the Cossacks, wore a full mane, long and dark, like some Yanni from hell. It’s a great look it if weren’t for all the killing and dying. And the head wear was awesome, much fur, feather, and jewelry. Whether or not any animals perished in the making of this movie, many did in its haberdashery.

And now, back to the grammar, I guess.

Mourners

This past weekend, I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. The Mourners is a series of small alabaster sculptures, most of them Carthusian monks, in various postures of bereavement, from the ambiently distressed, to the moonily melancholic, to the tombly ceremonious, to the quartzly content. The monks drape in robe and cowl, a tour de force of fold, with those mourners completely covered most affecting. Heads bowed, anonymous, their hoods like some great truncated probosces, they present as an image of death, but not death the grim reaper; rather fraternal death, brother death, necessary and inevitable, but perhaps clumsy, untimely and unintentional death as well. As if death had gotten a bad rap and were all too conscious of his image as the rapacious monster of life; and here, with a book instead of a scythe, he walks with us in somber, quiet, chagrined solidarity. Cowls number 51, 52, and 53 shed tears and wring hands; 59, 61, 72, 77, and 78 flash a bit of cheek, beard, or even full face in deep recess, revealing shadowy individuality but namelessness as well. What has this exhibit to do with Poland? Almost nothing.

The printed illustrated catalog, of course, in these post-modern times, emphasizes how these artifacts display the wealth and power of the Dukes of Burgundy, how the lavish ritual of their funerals and the sumptuousness of their ducal seat and final resting place in Dijon were intended to establish their primacy in the imagination of their people and their guests. Aristocratic propaganda. Only secondarily, even as an afterthought, an epiphenomenon, do these displays express beauty and genuine emotion. Sad in its way, but true enough. For the powers that be and would be, art has predominantly ulterior motives. Always has. But again, what does this have to do with Poland?

I’ve begun rereading Norman Davies’s history of Poland and flipped ahead to the 1370s to see if there were any connections between these ambitious Dukes of Burgundy and the end of the Piast dynasty in Poland. One almost coincidence: “From the technical point of view, their claims in the female succession were inferior to those either of Wladyslaw Bialy of Gniewkow, who was a monk in Dijon in Burgundy, or of Ziemowit III, Prince of Mazovia” (I, p. 102, my italics) That is to say, the model for one of those grieving good brothers might have been Wladyslaw. His dates put him in Dijon during the reign of Philip the Bold, the first of these Burgundian Dukes, and one under whose tomb the alabaster monks perambulate. Imagine this minor Polish duke, though in the royal line, so distraught at the death of his beloved duchesse (true fact) that he retired from life and power to the cloister to pray and mourn for the world and to express and model for us the proper attitude toward it. Such a story, of a single individual of the noblest motives, would redeem the entire exhibit, would it not? We could ignore the Dukes, John the Fearless and Philip the Good—who was probably not so good—and mourn our own mortality and that of our loved ones with these good monks and Wladyslaw. Unfortunately, further research revealed nothing of the sort. Wladyslaw has a story, and it is not uninteresting, but it is not redemptive, and has little to do with the Burgundian Dukes, though he returned to Dijon to die in 1388.

If I were a fiction writer like Henryk Siekiewicz, dramatic, romantic, alive to the pageantry of national consciousness, I could work with this, make something of Wladyslaw. But forsooth, I’m a historian, and while I believe one of those sad monks had such a story to redeem the exhibit—no. 71? (sweet hat)—I don’t know it and can’t tell it.

B-

My essay last week earned a grade of B-. This is almost a C, a grade otherwise known as failure. And given that our instructor grades generously, well, it sobers one. But I don’t worry myself, nie martwie sie. When you are older, there is something reassuring about the truth eventually getting out.

Little else to report on my increasing Polishness—little increase that it has been. This week we watch a movie, With Fire and Sword, based on the first volume of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Polish historical trilogy. It tallies 1100 pages in book form. I’m hoping for subtitles, preferably English.