In Heaven, Swearing

Sometimes at night, after working online, sitting six hours in a chair (but only six, and I do get up to make cups of tea from time to time), I’ll sit in bed translating a poem or a prayer and swear—in English, though I’ve learned the appropriate Polish and produce it fluently enough, I’m told. I swear because my brain is so slow, because my short-term memory and my long-term memory are about equally non-functional these days. How can you forget a word you’ve just looked up?! I’m like that guy in Memento, brain-injured, living in a world of sticky-note reminders, only mine are vocabulary, stuck to the pages of my books, which you would think I would have gotten into my brain by now, like słownictwo, “vocabulary,” which I have, though I just misspelled it. See. And I swear because my dictionaries, my Langenschiedt’s pocket and my big Kościuszko, are broken and defective. The binding of my Langenschiedt’s has released pages 759 to 771 from mandatory service, from ustać,”stop, cease” to zagnieździć się, “nestle, get a footing.” You cannot imagine how many words crucial to the understanding of whatever it is I happen to be reading just happen to fall between ustać and zagnieździć się. It’s uncanny how important the letter W is to understanding the Polish world. I’m holding on to the loose pages, but they’re usually across the room, and trying to keep them in order is itself an infuriating task. So I turn to Kościuszko, perfectly rich in W. But Kościuszko is bulky, “140,000 headwords, 400,000 meanings,” and my eyes are not what they used to be, and just as I get accustomed to hoisting Kościuszko into my lap—I’m guessing eight pounds—I’m reminded of its shortcomings, intermittently unprinted pages in S and T. I bought it online from one of those discount remainder-sellers. Now, between Langenscheidt and Kościuszko, I’ve got the language pretty much covered—except when the poets, damn them, cholera, invent words—but I have to remember to keep them both at hand. So there I am, in bed, in Poland, surrounded by books, with a cup of tea on the night stand, that is to say, “in Heaven,” w niebie, swearing.