'I Don't Look for Novelty'

"Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.” 

Aleksander Wat (1900-67), a poet who wrote middling avant-garde poems in Polish, also “spoke” one of the last century’s essential books (along with Solzhenitsyn’s, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, Whittaker Chambers’ and Vasily Grossman’s): My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated into English in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. He wrote as a witness.

 

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasions had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Wat would spend two years in Soviet prisons and camps, including the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow.

 

Good news: New York Review Books is soon to publish the coded diary kept by Wat, decrypted by his wife, Ola Watowa (1903-91), and translated by Alissa Valles, who has already given us Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski and Ryszard Krynicki. Book Post has published an excerpt. Following a stroke in 1953, Wat suffered from chronic pain, often cited as his cause of death by suicide in 1967. Wat writes:

 

“The only thing that gives me a sense of safety, is when a new life situation, an accidental configuration of things, persons, words, gestures, recognizes itself in identical images and comparisons of what has already been. This is the one thing I need, I of all people, once an adventuristic ex-avant-gardist: to know, touch, feel that what is has already been, that what I am experiencing in this moment has already been experienced and survived, that therefore it is within human power, and therefore within my power, to survive it.”

 

And this: “Because of today’s rules in poetry, today’s lack of rules, today’s elements—how else? I’m not a scribe or an antiquarian—I don’t look for novelty but rather for the continuous authentication of new arrangements of things, words, rhythms that have already been experienced many times. Nihil novi is not my philosophy, it is my shield, for in the new there is a terrifying meaning, in new nonexistence, since the “new,” insofar as it is new, has arisen from nothing.” 

 

Wat's fluency, the articulation of his memories and intellectual linkages, his gift for sheer storytelling, are phenomenal for a man in his sixties in chronically ill health, ravaged by the century he endured. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), Geoffrey Hill writes:

 

"Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat."

 

Wat illuminates our dark age with luminous words.