My second semester Polish grade is in: A-. Certainly closer to the truth of the matter than its predecessor, and I prefer the qualified, the diminutive in all its lesserness, its modesty, its unwieldy aerodynamics. A straight A average whistles through the stratosphere like a Polish saber; an A- muffles a bit owing to the wind resistance, like a battle hammer or a bulava. As you might guess, I’ve had much more time to reread Sienkiewicz since the final exam, 500 hundred pages, with only a couple hundred more to go.
Of course, I now know Polish better than I did when I received my A. The mechanics of the grading this semester, however, exposed one of my many weaknesses, my composition skills. I can’t compose (komponowac) in Polish, about my work, my family, my country (America) because I cannot think or say anything of interest, anything nuanced, anything rhythmic in the rudimentary Polish that I currently possess, so I think of what I want to say in English, then translate and transliterate and interpret into Polish with B-range results. The professor explained, somewhat apologetically, that I was too ambitious, and that while he took off for errors of grammar and usage, he did not reward for ambition. Never before have I been accused of ambition, but I deflected the charge with my own good nature, “One can learn much from mistakes.”
A second weakness, no doubt, was my oral incomprehension. My reading and pronunciation aren’t too bad, fairly fluid. But understanding the spoken word in its natural tempo and responding to it in a timely and coherent manner must be reserved for semesters hence, perhaps years. Last night I watched a recently released movie—Water for Elephants—upon the recommendation of a former colleague. A period romance—Great Depression, circus—with the indifferent Reese Witherspoon and the wonderful Christoph Waltz, it featured some Polish immigrant and language plot elephants...elements: Rosie, who had been trained in Polish and responded only to Polish commands. While it may seem humiliating to have aural skills inferior to a pachyderm, I now have a role model. Thanks, Jack.
