Aleksander Wat, Lucifer Unemployed, Trans. by Lillian Vallee,
Northwestern University Press, 1990.
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In these nine
stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history
on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and
the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of
religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the
anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe.
The title story
finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late
1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a
godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical
than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern
cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of
guaranteed immortality. In "The Eternally Wandering Jew,"
steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the
Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power,
"Kings in Exile," unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of
Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island
in the Indian Ocean.
"Wat... was a
central figure in Polish modernism and this—his 1927 book of
speculative stories—comes as a revelation... The style is quick,
syncopated, and piquant (excellently rendered by Vallee), with Wat
capable of richer tones as well... Wat's stories [indicate] the
special nature of the Mitteleuropisch Expressionism that
flourished—however briefly—in a literature we still know so
little about."—Kirkus Reviews
These nine stories, originally published in Poland in 1927, will
introduce American readers to the fresh, biting political and social
fictive manipulations of Wat, who died in 1967. Marked by prose that
is dense, even labyrinthine, as well as somewhat overblown in its
archness, the collection serves as a crucible where the line between
reality and fantasy is repeatedly obliterated. Wat fancies a Catholic
Church whose priests and pope of Jewish descent persecute the
anti-Semites/anti-Catholics; the latter group, headed by John Ford of
the automobile dynasty, have converted to Judaism. Elsewhere, in the
wake of WW I, a new island surfaces in the Indian Ocean and becomes a
home for dethroned monarchs; these rulers of civilization degenerate
into barbarians. A man searches for a street that never existed, and
a member of a theater audience impulsively joins the play. An
unemployed devil, who finds he is superfluous in the inferno of
atheistic modern times, becomes a film artist: Charlie Chaplin. -
Pubishers Wekly
"One of the
most original, fascinating, and curious figures in twentieth-century
Polish literature, Wat left behind an oeuvre which is salient,
artistically accomplished, and influential... with its shifting
narrative perspectives, wild imagination combining the trivial and
the fantastic, and highly 'subjective' lyrical style, [Lucifer
Unemployed] is a unique and important contribution to the
twentieth-century evolution of the short story and fiction and
general."—Stanislaw Baranczak
Aleksander Wat, Against the Devil
in History:
Poems, Short Stories, Essays, Fragments, Trans.
by Frank
L. Vigoda, Slavica Pub,
2018.
This
extraordinary poet can be seen against the background of three
periods of the 20th century. Born in 1900 to a Jewish merchant family
in Warsaw, he became an anarchist and futurist, edited a communist
journal, and was imprisoned by the Polish police. At the beginning of
WWII he was arrested by the Soviets and spent several years in Soviet
prisons. He returned to Poland an anticommunist in 1946, established
an important publishing house (PIW), in the 1950s suffered a stroke
that resulted in severe recurring pain, and started to write poetry
again. He emigrated to Italy and France, and in 1967, after years of
struggling with pain, he committed suicide. The third part of the
century saw the efforts of his widow Ola Wat (herself an interesting
writer) and a group of admirers to publish and promote his works, of
which a large part remained unfinished: My Century (conversations
with Czes aw Mi osz), collected poems, letters, miscellaneous papers,
and notebooks. The uniqueness of Wat's oeuvre lies in the seamless
blending of several seemingly heterogeneous components. He draws from
numerous sources, including the Old and New Testaments, mythology,
Oriental traditions, history, sociology, politics, biology, and
mineralogy, to name only a few. Yet at the same time his poems are
extremely sensual and somatic. Ideas, images, and dreams meld with
important existential and theological questions, oscillating between
hilarious affirmation and complete skepticism and negation, and
undermined by suffering and pain.
Aleksander Wat, My Century, Trans. by Richard
Lourie, New
York Review Books Classics, 2003.
In My Century the
great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of
life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth
century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz,
My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political
experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that
followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas
which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the
destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the
world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and
conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his
wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system,
of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision
of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat
writes,
As a document of historical witness, My Century is an extraordinary
work. But more than that, it is a masterpiece of autobiography. Wat’s
voice is irresistible, and he tells his story with such rigor and
intelligence, such overpowering human warmth, that one is permanently
altered by his words....It would be impossible for me to overstate my
admiration for this book. It is a magnificent achievement, one of the
most moving and powerful books I have ever read.— Paul Auster
Illuminating....What
Solzhenitsyn did for the camps, Wat has done for the prisons.— J.M. Cameron,
New York Review of Books
I couldn’t put it
down... one reads it with an excitement only a great novel can
elicit....No one has written so well on prison life, to my knowledge,
since Dostoevsky.— Irving Howe
A very remarkable
book indeed....There is, at every stage, Aleksander Wat himself, with
his keen intelligence, his powerful descriptive gifts and his moral
insight....The whole book is an impressive act of witness. It deepens
the reader’s response to life and lays bare a major tract of
history...
Such a fascinating
book to read, this spoken memoir by Aleksander Wat!....Aleksander Wat
was a poet, and My Century is a work of art....[It] may be read as a
spiritual biography of a generation of European intellectuals....I
would put it on a shelf in the vicinity of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag, so compelling is its testimony and analysis.— Jan T. Gross,
New York Times Book Review
With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat
Aleksander Wat (1900–1967), the nom de plume of Aleksander Chwat,
was born in Warsaw, the descendant of an old and distinguished Jewish
family which counted among its members the great sixteenth-century
cabalist Isaac Luria. He attended Warsaw University, where he studied
philosophy, psychology, and logic, and formed strong ties with the
literary avant-garde, publishing a first book of poems, Me from One
Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove, in 1920 and,
some years later, a collection of stories entitled Lucifer
Unemployed. Wat edited a variety of influential journals and helped
to disseminate the work of Mayakovsky and the futurists in Poland,
before forming an allegiance with the Communist Party and confining
his writing to journalism. In 1939 he fled east before the advancing
German army and was separated from his wife and young son. The family
reunited in Lwów, then under Soviet control, where Wat found work on
a newspaper, only to be placed under arrest. Imprisoned in the Soviet
Union for the better part of two years, during which time he
converted from Judaism to Christianity, Wat again rejoined his
family, who had been exiled to Kazakhstan, in 1942. They returned
after the war to Poland, where Wat began to write poetry again while
serving as editor of the state publishing house. In 1963, he left his
native country for France. Wat was invited in 1964 to the University
of California, Berkeley, where he taped a series of conversations
about his life and times with his countryman the poet Czeslaw Milosz.
Edited by Milosz, these were published posthumously as My Century.
