Aleksander Wat. “Mój wiek” (1977) - “Il mio secolo” (2013). Premessa

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1960s Czesław Miłosz recorded Aleksander Wat’s memories on tape. The recordings were then published with the title Moj Wiek (1977) and translated into many languages. A real “Odyssey of a Polish intellectual”, as the subtitle of the American version (1988) suggested, Wat’s memoir is regarded as one of the most important testimonies of the atrocities of the last century. Finally, after many years, it has been translated into Italian, and will be published in the Spring of 2013. An excerpt from Il mio secolo is published in this article with permission from the Sellerio publishing house. It is taken from the eighteenth chapter, where Wat describes the first Soviet jail in which he was detained.