Diary Without Vowels

Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), the nom de plume of Aleksander Chwat, was born in Warsaw. He attended Warsaw University, where he studied philosophy, psychology, and logic, and formed strong ties with the literary avant-garde, publishing a first book of poems, Me from One Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove, in 1920 and, some years later, a collection of stories entitled Lucifer Unemployed. Wat edited a variety of influential journals and was connected to the futurist literary movement in Poland. He fled the east in 1939 and confined his writing to journalism during World War II. In 1963, he left his native country for France. Wat was invited in 1964 to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taped a series of conversations about his life and times with his countryman the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Edited by Milosz, these were published posthumously as My Century.

Alissa Valles is a poet and a scholar of Russian and Polish literature. Her translations from the Polish include Józef Czapski's Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History (NYRB Classics), Zuzanna Ginczanka's Firebird (NYRB Poets), Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems and Collected Prose, and Ryszard Krynicki's Our Life Grows (NYRB Poets).