Słowami bólu. Transmutacje Aleksandra Wata
In the Words of Pain. Aleksander Wat’s Transmutations

Summary/Abstract: Aleksander Wat was one of those “great ill men of literature” who, dissatisfied with the indifferent language of medicine, stressed in their experience of an illness a human, own perspective. Testimonies of Wat’s painful malady – scattered in diaries, correspondence, and the book Mój wiek, and markedly present in his prose and poetry – never resemble observations of indices from a patient’s chart/diary and are always already interpretations and carriers of anthropological meanings. This sketch starts with the story Śmierć w szpitalu (Death in Hospital) in which the poetry of pain appears intra-typographically so as to once again read the poem with the W czterech ścianach… (Within Four Walls…) incipit as an explanation and transmutation of the poem about pain into a written down poem. This brief and frequently commented work constituting a hopeless centre of “the regions of suffering”, provides insight into the personality of the patient divided by an inner wall of pain, and explains this experience to citizens of the “world of the healthy” unfamiliar with it.

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