Verbs of Motion

In August of 2004, I hiked to the summit of Mount Giewont in the Tatras and took this picture, breathless, knowing I would return one day and walk this very path. Time passes, breath returns, and while I haven’t, the foreknowledge of my return remains certain. However, the knowledge of Polish verbs of motion that might get me there has yet to arrive. How would one even say that, in this context, in Polish? How does knowledge arrive? On foot typically, przyjść? (Close readers will note that I have discovered the symbol browser under the insert menu, where all Polish consonants have lain in patient wait for my discovering them.) By vehicle, przyjechać? Or on wing, przylecieć. Definitely on wing, I think, but is that arrival a one-time only completed action, or is it not rather a habitual or random motion, or a characteristic action requiring przylatać? If completed, wouldn’t it be the perfective, poprzylecieć? You can begin to see the conceptual problems in the Polish mind, complex and subtle, even if you can’t pronounce them, and those problems now beset me, and I have sat under in-class questioning in a blankness altogether embarrassingly complete. Professor Polakiewicz assures us, not without mischief in his voice, that the knowledge of verbs of motion will come—in twenty-five years. Maybe fifteen.

What sustains a pilgrim over the long blank hours is his vision.

The Fourth Semester

The word is out now, so generally that, at social gatherings such as one is likely to encounter over the holidays, I must relate any plans, any progress I have made in the great but ordinary adventure of becoming Polish. Fair enough. Where originally I had encountered some, not much, but some, unstated resistance to the idea—unwise, impractical, silly and impulsive (as if I’ve ever been any of those things; okay, maybe silly, once; well, it was sort of a phase)—now I receive only approval, enthusiastic support, and, of course, advice. And where auditors earlier registered a certain skeptical suspicion at the idea that I intended to leave momentarily, now a sense of impatience insinuates into the conversation. It may have been a year since they learned, and I’m still here. Perhaps Josh is all talk. (If so, he is certainly not conversationally Polish.) It may be years yet, who knows? I think I’ll leave when they least expect, when everyone has lost interest.

This week I registered for fourth semester Polish, the last of my intended academic exposures to the language and culture. After this, life and work, as it comes.

Potop

Between semesters, I’ve finished the first volume of The Deluge, or Potop, the middle blockbuster of Sienkiewicz’s trilogy.  The story of an intrepid, wayward, and none too bright Polish brigand, Pan Kmita, Sienkiewicz returns him to the paths of righteousness and true patriotism by means of his devotion to the beautiful and virtuous Olenka. Cloyingly conventional as its plot and plot devices, Potop’s eight hundred pages do rouse the Polish blood of this belle-lettrist, currently in the throes of grammar-induced anemia. (Use the instrumental case of gramatyka here.) At the halfway point in the novel, in Czestochowa, on the walls of the monastery at Jasna Gora, we’re holding off the damn Swedes with artillery, chorale music, and divine intervention—or witchcraft, depending on your denominational point of view.

Less bloody than Ogniem i mieczim, Sienkiewicz pays that much more attention to Polish moustaches, full, heavy, dangling even to the chest, which are tugged upon, chewed, bit down upon, twirled—but not twisted upward, which is a “sly vanity” and a foreign affectation. (84) Invading are the damned Swedes with their “upturned yellow mustache combed out at the ends into a pair of stiff outspread military brushes” (214, 284) or their “flared Reiter” (725) and their pointed chin whiskers; committing treason, the nietszchean dandy Prince Boguslav Radziwill with his “soft, pouting mouth seem[ing] particularly childish under the delicate little mustache” (514), thin and penciled “like a silken fringe.” (696) Or the German Ganhof, with whose “ragged, upswept mustache [he] looked the embodiment of darkness.” (697) The raised wings of moustache betoken an imperial court, not a noble republic.

Not that a single moustache type defines true Poles or Polishness. Pan Sapyeha, the faithful Hetman of this volume, “wore his greying mustache clipped short above his lip which, along with his pointed little beard, made him look somewhat like a foreigner, but he dressed in the robes and costume of a Polish noble.” (678) Rather, the “Polish” wasy are a distinctive national, but not a rigidly uniform, style: natural and abundant, but not wildly shaggy; cultivated and groomed, but not to the point of effeminacy; falling, draping elegantly down, like a bow, like honest defeat, nobly won. Mine begins to approach that ideal, inch by inch.

Z is for ...

S is for satisfakticzny, or should be, but because there seems not to be such a word in Polish, I guess I get a Z, for zadowalajacy, “satisfactory.” My quiz grades in the last half of class had been steadily dropping, B+, B-, C+, such that continued study under those conditions would have eventually ended in failure. I managed probably a B on the final, though the oral portion did not go particularly well. Next semester I will not have to teach overload, so I can resume under better conditions; however, I must confess that classroom and textbook instruction begins to wear thin. I is for immersion. I’ll need to get to Poland.

Wszystkiego Najlepszego w Nowym Roku

Polonistyka

It has been a long time since I’ve taken a thumping on a quiz—years, well, decades actually. But Klasowka #5 did a number on me. Unprepared as I knew I was, nevertheless the first page surprised me, stunned me, stupefied me. Initially perfectly clueless, and I mean both clueless and perfectly, I turned to the second page in search of a question I had any confidence whatsoever in answering. The returned quiz indicates quite a bloodletting, multiple shivings, now dried, revealing a loss of twenty points on the first page alone, with only six pristine responses of twenty items. On the second page, I dropped fourteen points filling in the remaining blanks, a nasty gauntlet of genitives and locatives. Somehow I managed the last half, the translation portion, with a minimum of damage, surrendering only an additional six and a half points, for a total of forty demerits. A forty-point loss over a mere three pages, earning me the worst quiz grade of my non-degree career, a B-. Which indicates one of two things: that Polish is a difficult language, with enormous opportunities for error; or, rumors of grade inflation in the modern academy are well founded. Much of both, I suspect.

We learned last week a new word, a new concept, polonistyka, “Polish studies,” an important and humbling addition to my vocabulary, for if I fail to become Polakiem, a name for that failure already exists, Polonistykanem.

Falls the Snow

Pada snieg. Padac (“to fall”), snieg (“snow”): “falls the snow”. Who doesn’t love the unconscious poetry of straight translation, the rendering of one language, word for word, unidiomatically into another. As if other cultures spoke and thought routinely in King James English, archaic, beautifully inverted. Falls the snow. It was snowing here Saturday night, three inches of the rich stuff, ermine and pearl. Comes the winter.  

Shifting Sounds

I no longer inwardly fume and outwardly decry the seven cases of Polish grammar, nor the rules and the exceptions of basic noun declension that derive from them. After fifteen months of exposure I’ve come to believe that in the score of years biblically remaining to me, a diligent person could achieve a reasonable, even relatively supple, grasp of their workings. After all, there are only seven cases, WHEREAS, in the Locative Case alone, twenty sound shifts occur. And what I mean by sound shifts is that in addition to remembering the appropriate endings by case, gender, and number (there are 5 endings), the ending itself can cause a shift in the sound of the consonant ending the noun stem. For example, one of the two standard endings for masculine singular nouns is e. But the e ending requires a sound shift, a “softening” of all hard consonants, which number 20. For example, the locative of kot (“cat”) would seem perfectly pronounceable to the English tongue as kote, “KOT-ay.” But this would be far too simple. Instead, Polish “softens” the t to a c and adds ie: kocie, “KO-chiej.” Admittedly, eight of the consonantal shifts require only an additional i before the e, an i which audibly, even visibly, softens the likes of p, b, f, w, m, s, z, and n to the American ear and perhaps even the eye. But what of r? It softens not with an i, but with a … any guesses, correct! How did you know? A z! The locative of biuro (“office”) is biurze, “byOR-zhe.” As if biurie were not soft and euphonious enough—which it is, btw.  And the velar g softens to … dze; k to c, pronounced, by the way as “ts.” As I reflect upon my making peace with the case system in Polish, I suspect that it has something to do with my emerging frustration with shifting sounds, just as a new and barbarous nemesis makes an honorable and worthy ally of an immediate previous nemesis.

Our instructor no longer refers to the regularity and mathematical precision of Polish. In some deep, historico-linguistic analysis the logic of the linguistic structure may be true and clear, or at least arguable, but to us, the heritage learner, the rules of Polish grammar seem just a little of rhyme with no reason, a bit of reason, but rhymeless. Learning Polish is like life: we have hopes (mam nadzieje) that it will all make sense at some point in the distant future, that it will not only be comprehensible, but comprehensible to me. We have glimmerings of its possible orderliness, assurances of its order with frank confessions of its disorderliness and exceptionality. We choose to persevere because, really, there is little choice. And tonight I realize, having just had my ass kicked by the quiz on Locative Case, that learning Polish isn’t a metaphor for life: just now it is life, or a large part of it.