Last week in class we took up, at least preliminarily, the concept of aspect in Polish verbiage, yet another of the complexifying features of Slavic language. A technical grammatical term distinct from tense, indicating how the speaker thinks about and portrays an action, one of the chief determinants of an action’s aspect is whether it is completed or not, a factor that can look very much like the action’s place in time, that is, tense. All very confusing, grammar. In English, we use the same verb, with a variety of helping verb constructions, to communicate both tense and aspect: “I read,” “I read,” “I was reading,” “I have been reading,” “I had been reading,” “I had read.” In Polish, most verbs actually consist of verb pairs: one that expresses continuous, repeatable, or incomplete actions (imperfective) and the other that expresses discrete or completed or complete-able actions (perfective). For example, czytac is the verb form one would use to say “I read,” “I’m reading,” “I was reading,” and “I will be reading,”—continuous, repeatable, a hopefully infinite activity, to read. However, if I want to communicate that I not only read last night but finished Sienkiewicz’s Pan Wolodyjowski, I would use the perfective verb przeczytac. Two verb forms instead of one with a simple identifying prefix doesn’t seem so bad, but of course, there isn’t a single prefix, prze, but multiple prefixes; other verbs use suffixes, others infixes, and others still engage verb forms that seem to share nothing but the same alphabet: mowic, “to speak,” and its perfective counterpart powiedziec. Huh? You just have to memorize.
After eight months I measure my progress in the language not by points or grades, correct answers or errors, but by the diminishing perplexity and intellectual outrage with which I confront the living linguistic arcana. Okay, I’ll deal with it.
This week Hoffman’s entire cinematic film version of Sienkiewicz’s trilogy arrived, and I watched Pan Wolodyjowski last night. The trilogy, like the boxed set of Chopin, runs to eleven hours. Having previously watched Ogniem i Mieczem in class, I’m over half way home. I haven’t much to add to my previous comments on both books and their filmography. I note that the actor who played my namesake, Karol Borowiecki, in Promised Land, Daniel Olbrychski, plays the mistreated, under-appreciated, and ultimately impaled ataman, Azia, long lost son of the Turkish ruler Tuhey Bay, in Pan Wolodyjowski. It’s a tough scene, but tougher in the book. And the facial hair of the 70s, the 1670s I mean, still inspires me to reverence my inner Cossack (or Emperor Tamarin). My early outgrowth, though, suggests more Bolshevik intellectual than Zaporozhdy free-booter. And heavens, what used to be salt and pepper is mostly now a chin of salt.
