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Lucifer Displaced
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16913 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1990 |
2,316 Words |
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Lillian Vallee
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In the early seventies, Orlanda Brugnola, a recording technician in the language lab at University of California at Berkeley, asked me to listen to and help label some of the Polish holdings in the lab's archives. They contained a random collection of Polish poetry and prose; some of the items were copied from Polish record, others recorded live by poets during their stays in Berkeley. Orlanda was recording Czeslaw Milosz's poetry and his readings of poets such as Adam Mickiewicz and Jozef Czechowicz, and this prompted the effort to catalog and organize the remaining spools of Polish recordings.
It was while performing this rather innocuous task that I came across a tape of Aleksander Wat reading his poetry - it must have been recoded during his stay in Berkeley from 1963 to 1965. I was familiar with bits and pieces of Wat's lyric poems from Milosz's lectures on Polish literature, but what I now encountered was the voice of a completely broken man: rasping, exhausted by lamentation, heavy with self-knowledge; a man whom the "white whale of the world" had hauled down to its pit. The first conclusion on drew upon listening to Wat's poetry, therefore, was deeply disturbing: The foe had been formidable and Wat had lost.
Or had he? The voice was debilitated but not without its self-deprecating humor. Exhausted but not mute. Utterly destroyed yet how strangely triumphant, for its will to love persisted, and it sought to express this to others.
Wat's quavering voice was my first lesson in literature as a bulwark against PAIN - in this case, excruciating physical and existential pain - and thus a fitting initiation into modern Polish literature. Twentieth-century Polish literature is on e great lesson in the transmutation of pain into cultural value, whether on e speaks of Wat or Milosz ("in my poems, the philosophy comes only from pain") or Gombrowicz ("a real man is one who is in pain") for whom pain was both inexplicable and a gauge of reality in a work of art. I realized in listening to Wat that the abyss and the triumph of his poetry were at the very pulse of man's twentieth-century experience and that a serious student of literature could not bypass their import.
The reality of malevolent forces in Wat's poetry and the intensity of being they provoked led me to many readings of his recorded conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, now translated as My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. It was there that I learned of Wat's role in Polish modernism as Futurist/Dadaist poet and author of a book of speculative stories called Lucifer Unemployed. If in his first volume of poetry (1919) Wat was "dancing on the ruins" of Western civilization, then the Lucifer stories became the tombstone he erected on those ruins after the dance was over. Little did Wat realize that he would soon become one of those forced to pay extravagant sums to the fiddler.
Anti-utopianism
Lucifer Unemployed first appeared in late 1926, postdated 1927. Many of the stories were published in the Polish periodical Skamander in 1925. Wat's stories were a continuation of the anti-utopian current in Polish literature, a trend already discernible in the late nineteenth century, as a shadow literature to optimistic social and philosophical visions fueled by technological advances. Anti-utopian writing in Poland was the vehicle for literary
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