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Lucifer Displaced
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16913 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
2,316 Words |
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Lillian Vallee
Lillian Vallee is a well-known translator of Polish
literature. Most recently, she has worked on several volumes
of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary and Adam Zagajewski's Solidarity,
Solitude. She teaches literature at Merced College. |
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
... (1996 of 13631 Characters)
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