Chariot or Flying Carpet or Well-Trained Dragon or ...

Every morning I silence the alarm on my iPhone and fall out of bed. After making coffee and doing a quick scan of the latest emails, I shut the computer and begin the day's dictionary searches.

This is because, as mentioned at work, I am reading a Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew. On Sundays I turn to a new chapter, read the whole thing, and write down the words I don't understand. Then I divide the list into six mini-lists. Every subsequent day I tackle a mini-list and choose 5-10 words to memorise.

I am now on Chapter 6, "Uncle Andrew Begins to Have Troubles," which is my English translation of Mr. Polkowski's Polish translation of "The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles."

To repeat what I said at work, it is very interesting to read a childhood favourite as an adult and in another language. You see all kinds of things you didn't see before. I've already pondered Uncle Andrew's willingness to use children in scientific experiments; now I'm contemplating Uncle Andrew's ability to convince himself, through use of alcohol and dressing his best, that a beautiful witch is in love with him. C.S. Lewis said this was a very grown-up type of silliness. Why, yes.

But another thing I have noticed is how vividly Jadis (the beautiful witch) speaks, and how what she says in Polish sticks in my memory. This is a bit unfortunate, as Jadis does not say things that you can say in polite conversation at Polish weddings, e.g. "SŁUGO!" ("You minion!").

Jadis, the last survivor of a civil war she waged against her "przeklęta" ("accursed") sister, describes the river flowing with blood, and herself pouring out the blood of her soldiers like water ("Potwór," mutters Polly, which means "monster", so is also useless for weddings), and what she said to her sister before wiping out the joint (i.e. "Tak, zwycięstwo, tylko że nie twoje!")

In Chapter 5, Jadis was awe-inspiring, but now in Chapter 6, she is rather funny. I think this is partly because instead of speaking English in Uncle Andrew's cozy London row house, she is speaking Polish. And just as some Poles first arrive in the United Kingdom with antiquated ideas of what the United Kingdom is like, so does Jadis.

"Procure for me at once a chariot or a flying carpet or a well-trained dragon, or whatever is usual for royal and noble persons in your land," says the Queen of Charn to Uncle Andrew.

When I first I heard these exact words at my mother's knee, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Jadis would expect such transportation in Victorian London, which she knew not at all. But after reading Polish Jadis demand, "Postaraj się natychmiast o rydwan (chariot) lub latający dywan (flying carpet) albo o dobrze wytresowanego smoka (well-trained dragon)....," I giggled.

Possibly my adult giggles are unfair to Jadis as my GREAT DREAM is to ride over vast acres of Polish countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh until I am terribly cold and then am returned to the warmth of a long, low country house called a dwór where I am given delicious clear red soup to drink and crunchy krokiety to munch. So far this has NEVER HAPPENED--partly because I am never in Poland in the dead of winter, but also partly because my own Polish friends never seem to have horses. They are utterly mechanised and given a choice would probably purchase snowmobiles, which is not the same thing at all.

Where was I?

Right, Chapter 6. Well,  I must say that a chapter a week is very slow going, but it is much better for my brains than just plowing through a book without looking up all the unknown words, let alone memorising the most useful of them. I read both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Polish in that skimming fashion, and although this might not have been totally useless, it certainly did not improve my speaking skills. However,  working so hard on Chapters 1 through 5 of The Magician's Nephew has certainly increased my oral vocabulary. At any rate, I say "w każdym razie" instead of "at any rate", which I tended to say an awful lot.

While reading something about language acquisition this week, I started to think about using all the knowledge about learning languages I have acquired--after six years of messing around with Polish--to begin learning Urdu. After reading up on Urdu, however, I decided that 2018 would not be the year. One thing I had forgotten was how difficult the first year of learning a non-Romance language is , and I was reminded when I looked at the Urdu alphabet.

The Urdu alphabet has "up to 58 letters", which is a depressing thought, and Urdu is written from right to left, which is not so depressing as it is unnerving.  While reading about this, I was suddenly reminded of my first foray into Polish, which was pronouncing "Przepraszam" ("Pardon me").  Now I can say prze and przy and szcz and styczeń without a problem, but it took a lot of painful and embarrassing work.

Do I have time for Urdu? No, I do not. And when I mentioned this to Benedict Ambrose, he cried out in dismay against the whole idea. He thinks learning Urdu is entirely impractical and was not swayed by the news that those who master Urdu can easily understand Hindi, too. Of course, he also thought Polish was terribly impractical, and yet who was it who explained to his battered Polish roommate in the neurology ward that the police needed to keep his clothing for evidence? Me. So there.