My first church experiences here, at Mariacki and at St. Peter and Paul’s, have been like my profane experiences in Polish life, familiar enough, but at the same time, linguistically almost perfectly unintelligible. I catch isolated words, maybe a prepositional phrase or two, an idiomatic formula here and there, but mostly I’m mute, and more importantly, in times of doubt, fearful that I’m ever really going to catch on—so many words, with infinite combinations, such sublime and punctilious grammar, and so goddamn fast. What’s a sinner to do?
I’ve memorized the Lord’s Prayer, Modlitwa Pańska. It’s taken an afternoon to figure out its movement, the technicalities of the grammar, the archaisms, and the particular word choices. Curious that neither the English nor the Polish bids for the forgiveness of “sins”: the English chooses quaintly for “trespass,” while the Polish opts for “faults” or collectively, “guilt,” (wina/y). And it will be some time before I can recite the Polish, if ever, with the automaticity that I can the English, sunk even as I am now in apostasy. But putting the prayer to memory has inspired effort, focused my mind on a task, and in its provisional achievement, encouraged me that such off-beat, seemingly arcane and infinitesimal exercises may be the best way forward, perhaps my only way. I’ve seen advertisements for language-learning that promise proficiency in 10 days—second language learning as faith healing, instant karma. And I know the scholastic method and its various disciplines, its various orders. Neither is my way, which I’d characterize as stubbornly, idiosyncratically leisurely. And if the Polish I learn in my own way, out of poetry and children’s prayerbooks, is not the Polish of the morning chat shows, Pytania na Śniadania, (“Questions for Breakfast”), is that such a bad thing? If I spoke Polish the way Rooster Cogburn speaks English in True Grit (Coen Brothers’ edition), that would be kind of cool, kind of Polish the way I want to be, charmingly alien, antique, though I admit, it’s no way to run a country or a modern economy or probably even a church.
