Schreiben. Schweigen. Sprechen: Dichter und Medium bei Aleksander Wat

Abstract

The Polish writer Aleksander Wat's fame is based on his memoirs entitled My Century: Spoken diary (London 1977). This book played an important role in the Polish intelligentsia's critical self-reflection about its ensnarement with communism. Since the publication of these memoirs in Poland, Wat is being rediscovered as a poet who had his debut as a futurist and came to be a religious mystic in his late works. This article sheds a light on the way Wat deals with questions of medial representation of poetry and, moreover, language in general. It argues that throughout his entire artistic life, Wat made an issue of the materiality of the word and therefore was troubled by the necessity to medially represent it. For the first time, Wat used a tape recorder for My Century and, in his later poems, he kept returning to this alternative medium for literature.