This is the first edition of Ola Watowa's unpublished journal written between 1955 and 1956. It covers a stressful period of in the Wats’ married life when, following Aleksander being diagnosed with a rare psychosomatic condition, the couple moved to southern France, where he sought relief from bouts of physical pain and mental anxiety. Ola's Travel Diary is a record of day-to-day struggles, despair, helplessness, and the restorative power of the creative process. This narration of a woman motivated by empathy and determined to make sacrifices to support her husband’s artistic career has the potential to inspire studies focused on that type of biography and the role of sacrifice in marriage.

This article is an attempt at interpreting the experimental verse of two Warsaw Futurists, Aleksander Wat's namopaniki and Anatol Stern's romans Peru [ A romance of Peru]. A series of analyses, conducted from the perspective of the materiality of language, indicates that the key to the generic status of Wat's verse is to be sought in the concept of metamorphism. Indeed, his namopaniki are best described as metamorphic poems in which the dynamic of transformation gets the better of both their linguistic material and their presumptive subjects. By associating the linguistic experiments of the two Warsaw Futurists, who came from Jewish families, with the situation of ‘being a stranger to one's language’ (Deleuze and Guattari) and Jacques Derrida's chafing at monolingualism, the article argues that Wat's and Stern's early poetic practice represents a turn to ‘minority art’, i.e. a form of discourse subversive of the dominant hierarchies of the ‘majority’ language and literature. Furthermore, the Deleuzian concept of minor literature ( littérature mineure) may be used to seek a finer differentiation between the Warsaw Futurist avant-garde and the East or West European models of Futurism and Dadaism.

The poetic work of Aleksander Wat has enjoyed unfl agging popularity for the last 25 years. Critical appreciations of his work invariably emphasize a strong connection between his poetic work and some elements of his biography, i.e. detention in NKVD prisons, deportation to Soviet Central Asia, and the pain and stress of an incurable illness in the late fi fties and sixties. This article argues that the key to his verse can be found the concept of somatopoetry which takes into account both the heightened awareness of the body and the sensuality of Wat’s lyrical utterance. More specifi cally, this article attempts to draw an acoustic map of the poet’s verse written between 1957 and 1967, using the tools of f musicology, cultural anthropology of things and audio-anthropology. Drawing on Andrzej Hejmej’s concept of musicality Type 2 (thematization of music in a literary composition), the article tries to trace the presence of instruments in Wat’s work and assess their phonic and cultural roles in the creation of meaning. Finally, the article claims that the phonic layer beneath the references to instruments forms a track that can be described as a route to the poet’s death.