Wat Aleksander - My century: the odyssey of a Polish intellectual

ALEKSANDER WAT (19001967), 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 Lww, 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.

CZESLAW MILOSZ was born in Lithuania in 1911. Over the course of his long and prolific career he has published works in many genres, including criticism (The Captive Mind), fiction (The Issa Valley), memoir (Native Realm), and poetry (most recently New and Collected Poems, 19312001). He is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

MY CENTURY

THE ODYSSEY OF A POLISH INTELLECTUAL

ALEKSANDER WAT

Edited and translated from the Polish by

RICHARD LOURIE

Foreword by

CZESLAW MILOSZ

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

The hand tells the bowstring:

Obey me.

The bowstring answers the hand:

Draw Valiantly.

The bowstring tells the arrow:

O arrow, fly.

The arrow answers the bowstring:

Speed my flight.

The arrow tells the target:

Be my light.

The target answers the arrow:

Love me.

The target tells arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:

Ta twam asi.

Which means in a sacred tongue:

I am Thou.

(Footnote of a Christian:

O Mother of God,

watch over the target, the bow, the arrow

and the archer).

ALEKSANDER WAT

Translated by Richard Lourie

My Century differs greatly from those books that usually bear the name Recollections or Memoirs. Because this book belongs to a separate literary genrethe tape-recorded conversationits value as a source of information about this century is arguably greater. Although the syntax has been smoothed and repetitions eliminated, the features of direct speech to a particular listener have been preserved. The speaker here emerges more actively and vigorously than do the authors of written memoirs, and he freely reveals the movement of his thought with its attendant multitude of associations.