Aleksander Wat

Aleksander Wat, (born Aleksander Chwat; 1900-1967) was a Polish poet, writer and art theoretician, one of the precursors of Polish futurism movement in early 1920s.

He was born May 1, 1900 in Warsaw. After a brief service with the Polish Army he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Warsaw University. In 1919 he was among the young poets to proclaim the advent of new, futuristic poetry. The following year he published the first set of his poems, which gained much popularity among the supporters of the new trends in literature of the epoch. Until 1922 he was one of the creators of the "Nowa Sztuka" ("New Art") monthly, and then "Almanachy Nowej Sztuki" and "Miesięcznik literacki". Initially a Communist, until 1931 he was also one of the main journalists of the Marxist "Tygodnik literacki". Until the outbreak of World War II he was also the literary director of "Gebethner i Wolff", the biggest and the most renown Polish printing house of the time.

After the Polish Defensive War he moved to Lwów, then under Soviet occupation. Despite his sympathy for Communism, he was arrested by the NKVD and, together with his wife Paulina (usually called Ola) and his 9 years old son Andrzej, exiled to Kazakhstan. Set free in 1948, he was allowed to return to Poland. He became one of the chiefs of the Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. However, his nine years spent in the Soviet Union cured his Communist sympathies and Wat was considered not reliable enough by the Soviet-sponsored Communist authorities of Poland to allow him to publish his own works. Instead, he devoted most of his time to translating of several classical pieces of English, French, German and Russian literature to Polish. In 1959 he emigrated to France and settled in Paris, where he died July 29, 1967.

Further reading

*"Aleksander Wat: Life of an Iconoclast"
*"Mediterranean Poems." Edited & translated by Czeslaw Milosz. Ann Arbor: Ardis, c1977.