Aleksander Wat Research Articles

Głos poety odzyskuje głos. O książce The Sound of Polish Modern Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II Aleksandry Kremer

The article summarizes the most important theses and interpretations contained in the book The Sound of Polish Modern Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer. First of all, it places the research achievements of the Polish-American literary scholar on the map of reflection related to sound studies and “philology of the ear”. Then, it points out what is particularly new and revealing in Kremer’s proposal for voice-oriented literary research and the audiosphere in Polish poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The following parts of the article are a recapitulation of individual chapters devoted to the author’s “vocal performance” (Kremer coined the term to describe an author’s reading of their own poetry) of works from the post-war period: Miron Białoszewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Julian Tuwim, Aleksander Wat, as well as poetesses: Anna Kamieńska, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Halina Poświatowska, Wisława Szymborska and Anna Świrszczyńska. Kremer uses excellent literary and linguistic skills, supplying traditional humanistic methods with conclusions from the calculations of the Praat program, which analyzes pronunciation parameters. The author of The Sound of Polish Modern Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II reveals to the reader the hitherto unrecognized world of sounds of Polish poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The poet’s physical voice is treated here as an element revealing the poetic “I” and illustrating the attitude towards his own poetry in general.

Proces twórczy i sekrety błędów

This text presents a very special creative process, which is an absolute exception in world literature. It is about the formation of My Century by Aleksander Wat and about various types of errors that were revealed during the preparation of the new edition of this work. The errors that appear in previous editions of My Century are of a varied nature. These are primarily “memory errors” of the author himself, there are also errors resulting from faulty listening to the recordings or technical faults in several recordings, and finally errors that are difficult to classify and explain, and which may be associated with exceptional difficulties with establishing the facts.

„… prawda musi wybrać połowę paradoksu i połowę stereotypu”. O tajemnicach Żyda wiecznego tułacza Aleksandra Wata

Aleksander Wat’s novella The Wandering Jew, published in 1926, is his only prose text in which the Jewish motif is the very center of the narrative. Wat carefully avoids dramatic or frightening notes, staying away from the characters created by Potocki, Quinet, Schubart, and Meyrink. However, certain aspects of the old version of the ancient myth remain: the millennial peregrination through history, the absolute solitude of the hero, and his magical movement and appearance in different parts of the world. The fusion of Catholicism and communism in the shadow of Marranism, represented by the protagonist Nathan, reflects grotesquely either on the phenomenon of Jewish youth fleeing the shtetls observed by young Wat, or on his own ecumenical dreams and reflections on the metahistorical role of Jews and their conversion. The article analyzes this issue also with particular regard either to the reception of the old Christian legend, or to the Anti-semitic narrative on the conspiracy of Jewish converts, shared by Keith Gilbert Chesterton, a contemporary writer very important for Wat.

The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer

Reviewed by: The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer E. M. Stańczyk Kremer, Aleksandra. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA London, 2021. 364 pp. Notes. Index. $45.00: £39.95: €40.95. In this brilliant new monograph Aleksandra Kremer studies poetry readings by major Polish poets that have been preserved through official, semi-official and private sound recordings. Her primary focus is on seven male and three female poets — Julian Tuwim, Czesław Miłosz, Miron Białoszewski, Aleksander Wat, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Kamieńska, Anna Świrszczyńska, Tadeusz Różewicz and Julian Przyboś — in addition to several others. Kremer sets herself an ambitious task: to explore how the poets’ approach to reading reflected their attitude to the Polish literary tradition, poetry performance and, importantly, poetry creation. Using the computer programme Praat, which analyses pitch, duration, loudness and timbre of sound waves, Kremer studies ‘each poet individually, trying to grasp their individuality at the crossroads of acoustics and linguistics’ (p. 27). To Kremer, a poem is not a static piece of work. Rather, the ‘the sounds of the poets’ speech […] supplement or contradict what we learn from print’ (p. 28). The book consists of five excellent chapters. Chapter one discusses what could be potentially the oldest recorded reading by a Polish poet, produced as a sound postcard in the United States in 1941. Julian Tuwim, the poet behind the recording, emulated an older tradition of reading poetry to friends and family. His sound postcard was sent as a Christmas gift to his sister in London, two decades before authors in Poland had access to comparable technology. In a similar vein, the young poet Halina Poświatowska recorded two of her works in 1959 during a stay with relatives in America. The recording was meant as a family keepsake which became all the more cherished after the poet’s untimely death eight years later. Kremer’s analysis of these early recordings [End Page 549] illustrates what she does so well throughout the monograph as a whole. She demonstrates that studying voice recordings such as these can open up space for thought-provoking comparisons; in this case — comparisons that run across generational, gender and stylistic lines. Chapter two discusses Czesław Miłosz as a reader and translator of his own poems. Kremer shows how the two roles overlapped in the poet’s biography. Miłosz’s own translations into English followed the Polish syntax and prosody which, even if unnatural in the target language, was meant to facilitate his participation — through poetry readings — in the cultural life of the United States where he lived for more than three decades. While his rhythmical and beautifully enunciated speech in Polish bore all the hallmarks of the ‘phonetic patterns from another time’ (p. 117), distinguishing his readings from both everyday speech and existing recitation styles, the poet’s recorded performances in English were visibly less skilled. Like Miłosz, Miron Białoszewski, who is the focus of chapter three, was an avid performer of his own poems. Tape-recording became central to his work in the 1960s and ’70s, as seen, for example, in the private recordings produced for close friend Jadwiga Stańczakowa. In contrast to Białoszewski’s theatrical style, readings by the Nobel Prize-winning Wisława Szymborska were understated and conversational, conjuring an atmosphere of home, even in the setting of a recording studio. The penultimate and final chapters deal with sound recordings that speak to the fragility of the poet’s body and their unwillingness or inability to deliver a ‘good’ reading, respectively. Chapter four discusses ‘taped farewells’ — recitations of poems interspersed with informal commentary — by sick and aging poets, such as Herbert, Wat, Kamieńska and Świrszczyńska. According to Kremer, these ‘highly somatic final recordings were courageous in revealing weakness, but they also aimed to overcome the body one last time in order to create variously imagined recorded afterlives’ (p. 216). Chapter five looks at the ‘unbeautiful readings’ by poets such as Różewicz who disliked performing and whose reading style...

Awangarda we wspomnieniach twórców nowoczesnych

This article is devoted to the analysis of the statements by avant-garde writers formulatedyears later, after 1956, and related to political, social and artistic transformations. It analyses theforms of expression (essays, memories, analyses, interpretative sketches, etc.) employed by formeravant-garde authors. The research material consists of the memories of Julian Przyboś, AnatolStern, Adam Ważyk and Aleksander Wat. What is significant is the analysis of the narrative strategyadopted by each of these authors as well as the position they gained after 1945 and, then again,after October 1956. This article focuses mainly on presenting the problematic aesthetic changesand indicates that, in this context, the attitude of avant-garde writers to neo-avant-garde art, to thenew literary trends emerging after the Second World War, is particularly important. The central issueexamined is the formulation of the concept of the avant-garde and its definition on Polish soil.The poets’ statements presented show concern for the image of the Polish avant-garde as well as theimportance of the competition for historical narratives. This is connected with the individual perceptionof the notion of the avant-garde. Some of the authors, for instance Julian Przyboś, consideredthe program and the theoretical nuances specified a hundred years ago very significant, whilethe others put great emphasis on the synthetic orientation which viewed the avant-garde as a wholeset of heterogeneous trends. It should be observed that there seems to be a significant difference ofopinion between Adam Ważyk and Aleksander Wat. The former sees the avant-garde in the contextof modernism and its changes, whereas the latter shows the degree to which twentieth-century artresulted from the innovativeness of futurists.

חורבנות Żydowskie klęski w poezji Aleksandra Wata

In Judaism, calamity [Hebr. חורבן churban, plural. חורבנות churbanot] is a cultural category that is not necessarily characterized as negative. It is viewed as a form of purification, which begins a crisis that finally leads to a religious and moral recovery. Three most important churbanot are usually recognized in the history of Israel: the destruction of Salomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.) followed by the Babylonian captivity, the destruction of Herod’s Temple by Titus (70 A.D.) with the subsequent dispersion of Israelites (Hebr. גלות [‘galut’]) and the Holocaust (1939–1945 A.D.), a planned and methodical extermination of European Jews. All these experiences of Jewish disaster strongly resonated with the work of Aleksander Wat (1900–1967), a Polish poet with Jewish roots. Two of his poems are analyzed here. The first one (consisting of two parts), entitled Na melodie hebrajskie [‘To Hebrew Tunes’] (from the volume Wiersze [‘Poems’], 1957), explicitly mentions two churbanot: the Babylonian captivity and the diaspora of 70 A.D. The other poem is the third part of Pieśni wedrowca [‘The Songs of a Wanderer’] (from the volume Wiersze środziemnomorskie [‘Mediterranean Poems’], 1962). It allusively mentions the Holocaust as the greatest Jewish disaster. In each case, the churban helps to identify the heart of Jewish identity. Because the Shoah cannot be said to have any positive consequences, Wat treats it in mystagogical terms, i.e., as a mystery.

Польский поэт Александр Ват о тоталитарных соблазнах и о России как «двуликом Янусе»

The common thread in the life history of Aleksander Wat is his skepticism to­ward absolute truths and their heralds. He was untrue to this principle for only a few years when he followed an “association” that supposedly held the truth – the communist movement. Wat regarded this relatively short “dogmatic sleep” as the biggest mistake of his life. Because of it, he contributed to spreading of one of the most inauspicious teachings of the twentieth century and burdened himself with unforgivable guilt. This disenchantment process was fueled by his longstanding confrontation with Soviet reality. Wat was outsider and an insider at the same time and could observe the Soviet experiment from both a distance and from up close. As a universally educated Central European, he also belonged to the great authorities on Russian culture and had complete command of the Russian language in all its nuances. This made it easy for him to integrate into Russian developments in a general European context, and at the same time to un­derstand the most important characteristics of Russia’s “special historical path”. In Wat’s eyes, Russia is a Janus-headed object. It has both a repulsive – as he put it – “Asiatic” face, and a charming European one. For Wat, Asia did not repres­ent the cradle of civilization, on the contrary. For him it virtually epitomized tyranny and disregard of human rights.

Portrety podwójne, 1939–1956. Wspomnienia polskich Żydówek z sowieckiej Rosji

Double Portraits, 1939–1956: Memoirs of Polish Jewish Women From Soviet Russia During the first months following Germany’s attack on Poland, some members of the Jewish community managed to sneak away to the eastern frontiers of the country which had been invaded and annexed by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939. The tragic experiences of these refugees, heretofore somehow neglected by Holocaust scholars, have recently become the subject of profound academic reflection. One of the sources of knowledge about the fate of Jewish refugees from Poland are their memoirs. In this article the author reflects on three autobiographical texts written by Polish Jewish women, female refugees who survived the Holocaust thanks to their stay in Soviet Russia, namely Ola Watowa, Ruth Turkow Kaminska, and Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon. Each of them experienced not only the atrocities of war, but also, most of all, the cruelty of the Communist regime. All three of them suffered persecution by the oppressive Soviet authorities in different ways and at different times. While Ola Watowa experienced (in person, as well as through the fate of her family and friends) the bitter taste of persecution and deportation during WWII, Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon lived a relatively peaceful life in that period (1939–1945), and Ruth Turkow Kaminska even enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle reserved for the privileged members of the establishment, and it was not until the years immediately after the war that the latter two women would face the true image of Communism as its victims. The Wats managed to leave the USSR shortly after the war, whereas for the Broderzons and the Turkows the war would not end until the death of Stalin and their subsequent return to Poland in 1956. According to Mary G. Mason, the immanent feature of women’s autobiographical writings is the self-discovery of one’s own identity through the simultaneous identification of some ‘other.’ It is thanks to the rootedness of one’s own identity through the connection with a certain chosen ‘other’ that women authors can openly write about themselves. The aim of the article is to attempt to determine to what extent this statement remains true for the memoirs of the three Polish Jewish women who, besides sharing the aforementioned historical circumstances, are also linked by the fact that all of them stayed in romantic relationships with outstanding men (i.e. writers Aleksander Wat and Moyshe Broderzon, and jazzman Adi Rosner), which had an enormous impact not only on their lives in general, but also specifically on the creation and style of their autobiographical narratives, giving them the character of a sui generis double portrait.

Ten sam głos. O „Dzienniku bez samogłosek” Aleksandra Wata

THE SAME VOICE: THE DZIENNIK BEZ SAMOGŁOSEK [A DIARY WITHOUT VOWELS] BY ALEKSANDER WAT The purpose of this article is an interpretation of Aleksander Wat’s oeuvre from logopedic and literary perspectives. The author argues that the analysis of Aleksander Wat’s personal and medical documents, as well as of the phonetic transcripts of the recording of his voice, proves that he suffered from flaccid dysarthria. Furthermore, she also suggests that there is a correlation between Aleksander Wat’s speech disorder and his literary works, which serve to record his suffering and are an attempt to represent dysarthria in poetry. On the example of the poet’s early works, she shows that in his youth Wat was already interested in speech disorders and the significance of sound in poetry. His later compositions reflect his renewed interest in the field after he experienced a neurological incident. It turns out that the futurist poet’s interest in the sound of poetry and in utterances on the margins of standard discourses (speech impediments, stutter, errors, etc.), characteristic of many eminent avant-garde 20th-century writers, gained a personal meaning in Wat’s late works.

Włoskie inicjacje Aleksandra Wata

The article presents the stages of Aleksander Wat’s first journey to Italy in 1949 – starting from Venice, through Florence and Rome, finishing in Naples and Capri. Most of all, the article interprets the poetic records of the places visited by the poet and his impressions written down in letters. As a result, what the journey to Italy becomes for Wat is not only a discovery of the beauty of landscape and the plenty of art, but, most importantly, an experience of physical contact with the Mediterranean land, an initiation into the fascinating witnessing of the incarnation of cultural tradition into a visible landscape, a sensual initiation into the legacy of the Mediterranean. The coda of the text is his unexpected reminiscence from the first journey to Italy recorded in a social realist drama.

Paradoksy awangardowego zaangażowania. Milczenie artysty i rewolucja. Przypadek Aleksandra Wata

At the end of the 1920s Aleksander Wat quits publishing his literary texts and focuses on editorial and journalistic activity thus developing the model of a romantic rigorist of action created by Adam Mickiewicz. The purpose of this article is, first of all, to compare the ideological postulates of Mickiewicz and Wat regarding the relationship between language and action, as well as to demonstrate the convergence of their social and political background. Secondly — I will examine the journalistic activity of Wat from the period of “Miesiecznik Literacki” (1929–1930): analyze his critique of Futurism (as too “literary” and only apparently engaged) and a new formula of non-fiction (presented in essays devoted to the social role of reportage).

ALEKSANDER WAT AND HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

Aleksander Wat and historical experience An exceptionally complex biography of Aleksander Wat, apparently present in his literary output, makes him a person especially privileged that betoken the history of the 20th century. A historical experience constitutes for Wat an artistic problem, literature becomes a record of his experience – a direct and authentic record. However, since writing is not only an ethnic obligation but also the inclusion into a widely understood cultural context, Wat undertakes the attempts of communicating with the world, it becomes though more and more difficult for the poet due to the lack – in his opinion – of a suitable poetic language for the description of the world. The outcome of it is Wat’s reaching the borders of the speech – to silence ([Zakułem się w pancerz myślenia...]). What Wat considered in his experience as the most important, it becomes therefore strengthened not only in his poetry but, above all, in Mój wiek [My Century] – a text not written but spoken, tape recorded; richness (“the excess of information”), digressiveness but also some breaking up, some formal “splitting up” of this text, reflects most fully heterogenous, complicated, full of suffering Wat’s experience. A vitally important in this situation is Czesław Miłosz, Wat’s interlocutor whose discreet presence, wise posing of questions orders the picture drawn chaotically by Wat.

ALEXANDER WAT AND ROMANTICISM (ONCE MORE)

In the sketch, the problem taken is the relation of Aleksander Wat to the Polish romanticism, both in terms of how to troubleshoot inherently more formal as well as final transfer of the works. Analysis of individual poems (including The Persian Parable, Across the Square) lead to the conclusion of a distinct connection between Wat and the Lausanne lyricism of Adam Mickiewicz.

»Within the four walls of my pain«

Abstract The article explores the experience of physical and mental illness in the works of two 20th-century Polish poets, Aleksander Wat and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. Wat’s writing concentrates around his neurological disorder and the feeling of isolation it induces. Dycki, on the other hand, constructs the speaking persona of his poems around schizophrenia. He creates his own characteristic poetic diction, full of obsessive repetitions, which is meant to embody mental illness in a textual form. The article looks at how different aspects of suffering are expressed in modern Polish poetry, based on the example of two representative and well-known authors dealing with illness.

Mi siglo. Confesiones de un intelectual europeo de Aleksander Wat en España. Una traducción imposible

My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual by Aleksander Wat in Spain. A witness of the twentieth century My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual by Aleksander Wat has been prepared by the pair of translators J. Slawomirski and A. Rubió and edited in the editorial Acantilado in 2009. The translation had to be a great challenge since the book is a complicated and hybrid text. With regard to the generic form, it is a trans-discursive text, as far as the content is an unfinished speech and as far as the style is a poetic text. We have been analyzing these three aspects of the book to conclude that the style chosen by the translators determined the shape of Wat’s book, that is, a kind of historical document or personal testimony.

Wat plus inflacja (w humanistyce)

Tytuł książki Marty Baron-Milian Wat plus Vat. Związki literatury i ekonomii w twórczości Aleksandra Wata wprowadza sugestię, że mamy do czynienia z oryginalnym ujęciem utworów autora Mojego wieku, ale czytelnika tej pracy czeka niemiłe rozczarowanie. Autorka, niewątpliwie oczytana w autorytetach współczesnej humanistyki, sprawnie posługuje się jej instrumentarium pojęciowym, natomiast teksty samego Wata interpretuje w sposób dyskusyjny, nieprzekonujący i nierzadko po prostu dowolny, z zadziwiającą i trudną do przyjęcia dezynwolturą traktuje bowiem ich historyczne i historycznoliterackie konteksty, podporządkowując swoje odczytania apriorycznie przyjętym tezom. Baron-Milian daje w swojej książce wyrazisty, choć zapewne mimowolny, przykład retorycznej „inflacji” we współczesnej humanistyce.

Listy Józefa Wittlina do Stefanii Kossowskiej (opracowanie tekstologiczne Paweł Kądziela)

A significant part of diverse epistolary works by Józef Wittlin have been published over the last several years. We are familiar with the poet’s letters to Roman Brandstaetter, Witold Gombrowicz, Wacław Iwaniuk, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Zofia Starowieyska-Morstinowa, Juliusz Sakowski, Tymon Terlecki, Aleksander Wat, and with 82 letters to different recipients (e.g. Stefan Żeromski, Julian Tuwim, Ludwik H. Morstin, Stanisław Baliński), which were gathered by Tadeusz Januszewski in one volume. In 2014, a large volume Listy do redaktorów “Wiadomości” containing 23 Wittlin’s letters to Stefania Kossowska, the last editor of the weekly magazine, from the years 1969–1975 and edited by Janusz Olejniczak was published. Their manuscripts can be found in the archives of “Wiadomości”, which were donated by Kossowska to Nicolaus Copernicus University. Wittlin and Kossowska’s friendship lasted much longer and their letters prove that. During my stay in London in March 1987 Stefania Kossowska gave me an envelope with letters and postcards written by Wittlin in the years 1963–1974 and addressed to her. Considering the publication of other Wittlin’s letters to Kossowska, the edition of letters stored in my archives seems to be justified. The letters allow us to specify many facts related to the writer’s life. In Wittlin’s writing letters are something more important than just a commentary to his poetic, prose, essayistic, and translation works. They serve as a compliment to his literary activity as they were often created instead of essays, on the margins of the author’s experiences, thoughts or inspirational books he read. Successively announced bigger or smaller parts of letters by the author of Sól ziemi can be an indication of the future reading of the whole edition of letters put into chronological order.

Aleksander Wat and His Polish-Jewish Identity: The Dilemmas of Identity of the 20th Century Polish Writers of Jewish Background

The present study aims to bring to light the problem of the ethnic identification of Aleksander Wat, an outstanding Polish-Jewish poet. Debating common view of Jew and Pole being synonymous in Wat’s ethnicity, the author attempts to trace the development and the transformation of this ethnicity. The author shows the dynamics of its evolution in a theoretical framework in the form of a fluid and dynamic model of ethnic identity. Focusing on the historical context is imperative in asserting that in the case of Wat his comprehension of the Holocaust initiated a process of rebuilding and consolidation of his Jewish identity (the poet’s version of spiritual Aliyah). The final phase of the process can also be contributive to othering of his Polish “habitus”.

Linguistic record of suffering in pain disease (Wallenberg syndrome) in “The Diary without vowels” by Aleksander Wat

AbstractThe elaboration is rooted in the humanities, it constitutes a so-called case study and it suits the discussion on the significance of psychosocial, biographic and axiological factors in the study of people with disabilities. The Diary by Aleksander Wat, a poet and intellectualist constitutes an extraordinary and the only such mature testimony of suffering written in Polish, a linguistic record of pain in Wallenberg syndrome. Raising awareness and the holistic approach to disability is particularly important if rehabilitation is almost impossible. Apart from physical pain, mental pain is equally significant, and a physiotherapist with their compassion and understanding can significantly alleviate suffering of the patient and their loved ones. In the elaboration significance of the humanistic coefficient is highlighted, the application of which in the rehabilitation interaction protects both sides of the contact from the asymmetry of power relations.

Filip Istner (1912–1990)

Filip Istner was a poet and a press and radio journalist. Until 1957 he worked for the Polish Radio, and after that as a freelancer in Kurier Polski and Tygodnik Powszechny. After leaving Poland he wrote for Kultura in Paris and Wiadomości in London. In 1962—as Wiktor Nowicz— he published a book “Watykan w poszukiwaniu nowych dróg.” He left Poland in December of the year 1968—together with his wife and 12-year-old daughter and moved to Israel. After his wife’s death he moved to Sweden. He published only one tome of poetry in Stockholm titled “To już.” Many of the poems remained handwritten. Istners’ poetical debut is an expression of mature, late creativity. Czesław Miłosz compared Istner’s poetry to the poetry of Aleksander Wat. Filip Istner’s poetry is evidence of a huge sensitivity both moral and spiritual. F. Istner’s archive can be found in the Archives of Polish Emigration in Toruń.