Aleksander Wat - One of the most original, fascinating, and curious figures in 20th 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,

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.