In the interest—and the frankly baseless presumption—of fluency, I ordered and have received an untranslated anthology of Polish poetry, straightforwardly enough, Antologia Poezji Polskiej (Nobel: Warszawa, 2001). Would that the rest of the text were that straightforward.
What such impatience and presumption teach you is that while you may have a fair to middling grasp of the grammar and some meta-linguistics, your usage is halting at best, your vocabulary, laughable, pronunciation not what it should be, and your grasp of idiom still achingly wishful. True, you may manage a B for the course, perhaps even a B+, but, as you’ve always reminded your own students, grades are essentially meaningless.
Impertinent as this purchase may have been, impatience can still produce real, sometimes timely learning, as in this case, sad wisdom. It took awhile, but I found a 16th century verse from Jan Kochanowski, the father of Polish poetry, that I could more or less comprehend—and feel.
O Tymże
Wczoraj pił z nami, a dziś go chowamy;
Ani wiem czemu tak hardzie stąpamy.
Śmierć nie zna złota i drogiej purpury,
Mknie po jednemu, jako z kojca kury. (16)
I had to look up tymże, chować, hardzie, stąpać, mknąć, and kojec (25% of the text and 50% of the key words) to come up with this translation:
“Yesterday he was drinking with us, and today we bury him;
I don’t know why we pace so proudly.
Death knows not gold and dear purple,
He steals up to one as from a chicken coop.”
Death, śmierć, “shmee-airch,” what a harsh word, what an inaugust, rodential image, that varminty rustle through the leaves, that lethal minky insouciance, mocking our dignity, our hard-won self-esteem, carrying off this week the fathers of friends, the friends of friends, and today, a rich poet, though not in gold or purple.
