Wat, Aleksander

Aleksander Wat, poet, translator, critic, and co-founder of the Polish Futurism movement, was born Aleksander Chwat in 1900 in Warsaw, Poland. His early volumes of poetry include JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka ( ME from One Side and ME from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove, 1920) and Bezrobotny Lucyfer ( Lucifer Unemployed, 1927). Wat's career was thwarted for decades during the Second World War and the Soviet era, as he was repeatedly imprisoned for political reasons and, with his wife Paulina (Ola Watowa) and son Andrzej, exiled to Kazakhstan. From the 1950s on, he suffered from a debilitating neurological illness (diagnosed as Wallenberg's syndrome) that also significantly impeded his writing. In 1959 he emigrated to France, where he lived until his suicide in 1967. In 1963-1964 he had a visiting appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, where he collaborated with Czesław Miłosz to record his memoirs. Wat continued to write prose and poetry in his later years. Much of this later writing was published posthumously, including Dziennik bez samogłosek ( Diary Without Vowels ) and Mój wiek ( My Century ), memoirs that recount his experience of twentieth-century Eastern European literary and political history.

From the guide to the Aleksander Wat papers, 1915-1988, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)