Fundacja Court Watch Polska

Two young Polish scholars, Stanisław Burdziej and Bartosz Pilitowski, from the Universities of Olsztyn and Toruń, respectively, visited the campus this week and presented on the contemporary court system in Poland. Members of the Fundacja Court Watch Polska, they were in Minnesota briefly in search of ideas for court reform. Activist, engaged sociologists they represent a new generation of scholarship in Poland—and, actually, elsewhere—concerned with public policy-oriented research. Lovely minds, helpful, hopeful, serious, earnest but not naïve. I liked these Poles.

They would seem to have their work cut out for them. But they asked for advice, and being an adviser, I offered that the rhetoric of reform—even of revolution in the United States—always harks back to a founding golden age. Don’t ask for something new, ask for something old, something you’ve already had, something you’ve already done. In the U.S. we invoke the Constitution. Before the Constitution, we invoked our rights as Englishmen to justify a Revolution against the British Empire. How’s that for cheek? Stanisław took down a note, then reminded me that their Constitution is post-Communist era, hardly a golden age, and 270 pages long.  (“Quinn’s Law: the longer the constitution, the shorter the shelf life.” Frederick Quinn, Democracy at Dawn: Notes from Poland and Points East, 22) That could be a problem. Then Stanisław identified Kosciusko’s Constitution of May 3, which has real iconic promise, but it never went into effect. Otherwise, you have to go back to Kazimierz III Wielki, “Casimir the Great,” who according to our readings just last week, “Polecił ponadkto skodyfikować prawa zwyczajowe z terenów Wielkopolski i Małopolski. Sądy miały odtąd jednakowo sądzić i wydawać takie same wyroki.” (“He recommended the codification of the customary laws of the territories of Great Poland and Small Poland. Courts henceforth had to judge equally and render the same verdicts.”) 

Everything that needs to be done, has been done. We need only remember how to do it.

I hope that reading’s on the Final.

Last Class

Next class will be my last class. My final exam the following week, technically won’t count as instructional—perhaps only destructional. Two years, four semesters, 60 class periods, 200 hours of contact time (193 for me, as I missed two classes), with another 400-500 hours of study—hard time, but life well spent. My grade going into the final has risen to A-/B+. The language is not getting easier, but I think the quizzes are. Not complaining, just observing.

Is it heresy for me, an academic professional, a university citizen, to confess that as much as I love learning, reading, and studying, I’m tired of schooling? The accountability, the grading has rendered the pursuit much less leisurely, much less liberal; and then there’s the memorization. Perhaps I’ve learned Polish as well as Polish can be learned in this way and in this time. Perhaps I’ve laid the firmest of foundations. Maybe even probably. But however well-disposed I remain toward my subject matter—Polish language, literature, and culture—and my professor and classmates, the regime of exercise, quiz, and exam wears a man down, unschools him. We have the medieval university to thank for this, of which, Poland has one, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (1364) and about which we read for next week to close out this cycle.

Getting There

With less than a month of classwork ahead, I have been meditating next steps. I have considered, more speculatively than seriously, the quite romantic act of chucking it all—my current life—and disappearing, stowing away on a tramp steamer or going before the mast, a deck hand on some shadowy merchantman, bound for Gdansk. Slip into the country, have adventures, master the language, become Polish. A few onlookers and overhearers have recommended this very course of action, or something like it, the great leap of faith, the all-in, the deep immersion, polonization by total osmosis—also known as an invitation to drowning. That’s not how I do things. And I rather like my current life, which deserves better than chucking.

Instead, in the esoteric human resource texts at the university in which I have labored lo this quarter century, my supervisor has located a section, relatively recent, on the recess appointment. In times of budgetary uncertainty, when the two parties are in agreement, the university and the employee may agree to reduce the latter’s appointment to as little as 50% time, with the university maintaining his health benefits. The possibility of doing my work, academic advising, by means of email and Skype has become increasingly, technologically attractive. So that instead of a leap of faith, I could make my typical classical little hop. In my experience, one doesn’t have to go looking for adventure; if you’re curious, it finds you. 

Verbs of Fear

On rare occasions a textbook can hit, probably unconsciously, an unexpectedly fine stylistic and philosophical note. This week as we survey the main uses of the Polish conditional—a tongue-twisting mood of consistent impossibility, for example, przemilczelibyśmy, “we (masculine or mixed gender groups) would/might be silent”—main use letter e. reads as follows:

Following verbs of wanting, doubting, fearing:

Since the whole of life demonstrably (viz. Gautama Buddha) consists of wanting, doubting, and fearing, what need then, really, of the indicative or the imperative mood? (A good question for all languages; though, I suppose that the interrogative could survive as a sort of yang to the conditional yin.) Thankfully, or not, the Buddha wasn’t Polish, and so the wheel of suffering/learning rolls on. Quiz tomorrow.

Use e. works like this: whenever you use a verb like chcieć (“to want”) or wątpić (“to doubt”) or bać się (“to be afraid”) to introduce a verb phrase or a subordinate clause, you would incline to using the conditional verb form in what follows, for example:

Boję się, żebym nigdy nie zrozumiał jędzyka polskiego. (“I fear that I might never understand the Polish language”). Strangely, ironically, beautifully, Professor Swan adds,

Verbs of fearing and doubting may also be followed by the indicative, in case there is greater certainty regarding the “feared” or “doubted” event.

In which case, the indicative: Boję się, że nigdy nie zrozumiem jędzyka polskiego. (“I fear that I will never understand the Polish language”). Hopefully, the Buddha proves correct, and that this latter seeming certainty will evanesce for what it is, an illusion, and I will understand Polish, not perfectly perhaps, ever, but sufficiently, significantly enough.

Impatience

It’s official. I’ve become impatient. After four semesters, term break, and the early arrival of spring, I want to be done with school and fluent in Polish. Now! Well, school will end soon enough at least.

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 16^th 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.

Ferie Wiosenne

At midterm/spring break, I’ve pulled my grade back into the B range, where I’ll be happy to close out the semester, God willing. The dative case chapter quiz won’t likely ruin me, Klasówka chyba mi nie zepsuła, and somehow I managed to get through the in-class number review and the genitive of time exercises with a minimum of embarrassment. Sometimes I almost think I’m beginning to understand. I’ve memorized the months of the year. Progress is being made with half a semester to go.

Checking my blog stats, I tally page viewers, one-time only and sporadic, from forty countries, including just recently all of the Baltic republics—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—Greece, Belgium, Hungary, and, charmingly, Trinidad & Tobago. The most curious recent point of access was from Jersey, and not the state, New Jersey, but the English Channel isle. How cool is that? So I looked into the connection, and the web authorities note that some Poles and Slavs migrated there after the failed revolutions of 1848. Poles, it would seem, are everywhere—though I have no chance readers yet from China or Africa. Otherwise, I enjoy occasional and undeserved attention from a significant portion of the world’s landmass. Which is as attention should be in my case. Professor Davies reminds me that “Almost one-third of all ethnic Poles live abroad.” (II, 275) The Trinidadian Poles! Witamy!

And my ciupaga arrived this week. A ciupaga is a highland shepherd’s ax, a kind of a cross between a shephard’s staff and a hatchet, which has been further modified these days into a kind of hiking-walking stick/tomahawk. A serious cudgel, nevertheless, a bludgeon with an edge. In volume II of Potop, a pack of Tatra highlanders save King Jan Kazimierz from a column of Swedish cavalry. The work of those “vengeful axes” was complete and not pretty. I hope to use mine exclusively for hiking, but it’s good to know that one can bring down an invader and an occupier with it in a pinch.    

Paszport

The new passport arrived last week, the third edition of my little blue book of international memories and futures. My old passport returned this week in a separate envelope. Curious, two mailings, but pretty darn quick service, I dare say. Government works, at least the State Department.

I contemplate three faces over thirty years, a moustache on each. The first sports a light isosceles smudge, somewhat asymmetrical, on a face in search of symmetry, with a cheesy fringe of beard adding to its youth, presumption and cluelessness. Note: I did, briefly, have hair.  At forty, I wore mid-face a solid wedge of masculinity, but without ostensible national political association. Under the auspices of this particular look, I made my first trip to Poland.  Two later trips  I traveled essentially shorn. My current face brandishes its Polish moustache(s)—plural in the Polish—brushes now dense enough to thatch a Kashubian roof. It will serve as my visa.

I read this month of an organization in the United States calling itself the American Mustache Institute and promoting a “million mustache march” in April, as well as legislation, including tax breaks, in support of hairier faces. We are a silly people sometimes, extolling the economic benefits of mustache cultivation with hardly a word about the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic benefits. The Poles wrote poetry on the subject: Franciszek Dionizy Kniaznin. (See “Twirling moustaches and equestrian statuary: Polish semiotics in Conrad’s ‘Nostromo,” Jean Szczypien, Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 28, 1995) Now to find Kniaznin’s texts.