'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…