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Japanese Archery
By Aleksander Wat
(in Marcin Malek poetical interpretation)
1
The hand to the bowstring speaks:
Bend to me, yield.
The bowstring to the hand replies:
Strike bold, be steeled.
The bowstring whispers to the shaft:
O arrow, flee!
The arrow to the bowstring calls:
Unshackle me!
The arrow sings unto the mark:
Burn, beacon bright!
The target murmurs, soft and dark:
Love me, mid-flight.
2
The mark to arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:
Tat twam asi—
A murmur in the sacred tongue:
I am thou, no more, no less.
3
(A Christian’s coda, scrawled aside:
O Virgin bright,
Guard the mark, the shaft, the flight—
And the hand that bends the bow this night.)
Menton-Garavan, 1956
Aleksander Wat: The Poet as an Arrow in Flight
The Hunt Begins: Kaczmarski’s Aleksander Wat
I first heard Aleksander Wat’s name not in a classroom, nor in a dusty anthology, but in the breathless, sharp-edged words of Jacek Kaczmarski’s song, “Aleksander Wat.”
It began with an image so vivid, so searing, that it lodged itself in my mind before I even fully understood what it meant:
“Zmęczony Piorun wzrok Parsifala
Biały od żaru kazachskich pól
Ogląda owal Świętego Graala
Krwi Boskiej Kielich Mądrość i Ból.”
(A weary Thunder, Parsifal’s gaze,
Scorched by the Kazakh sun’s embrace,
Beholds the Grail’s eternal blaze—
God’s Blood, His Wisdom, and His Pain. [ also interpreted by Marcin Malek] )
It was a hunting song, a ballad of pursuit and exile, of a man trapped in the vast mechanisms of history. Kaczmarski, the bard of Poland’s conscience, had sculpted Wat into a Parsifal for the 20th century—not a knight on a noble quest, but a man scalded by the fire of ideology, forced into the wilderness of Kazakh exile, looking for meaning in the shattered remnants of his beliefs.
That song, that hunt, stayed with me. I was nearly fourteen when I first heard it, and something in Kaczmarski’s voice told me that Wat was not just another poet. He was something else. He was a wound in the body of history.
I had to follow his words.
And when I found them—o, good, when I found them—I was never the same again.
The Bowstring of History: Wat’s Life as a Poem of Fate
Born Aleksander Chwat in 1900, Wat was a child of contradictions—a Jew, a Pole, a revolutionary, a victim, a believer, an exile, a heretic, a witness. He belonged to no single world. His mind, like his fate, would never rest in a single identity.
As a young poet, he embraced Futurism, the avant-garde explosion of words and ideas that sought to obliterate the past. He was intoxicated by the promise of revolution, believing that the old world must be torn down for something new, raw, vital.
But history is cruel to its visionaries.
In 1939, Stalin’s NKVD came for him. Arrested, interrogated, and hurled into Soviet exile, he was forced to witness the machinery of revolution from the inside—not as a poet of progress, but as a prisoner of the lie. He rotted in Soviet prisons, starved in Kazakh exile, watched men break, betray, vanish.
The Marxist Wat died there. The witness was born.
By the time he was released, he was no longer a poet of the new. He had become a poet of the irreversible, of the irredeemable, of the body crushed under history’s wheel.
He could not stay in Communist Poland. He fled. He lived in Paris, in Rome. His body was already broken by the past—illness, exile, interrogation, starvation had left their permanent wounds.
In 1967, he took his own life. Not because he lacked the will to live, but because he had already lived beyond what was bearable.
“Japanese Archery”—A Poetics of Precision and Submission
Among Wat’s poetry, “Japanese Archery” is one of the most deceptively simple. On the surface, it is about the act of drawing a bow, releasing an arrow, striking a target.
But beneath that control, there is a deeper, relentless fatalism.
The Chain of Power and Submission
The hand to the bowstring speaks:
Bend to me, yield.
The bowstring to the hand replies:
Strike bold, be steeled.
The poem begins with command and submission. The hand—the wielder of power—orders the bowstring to obey. But the bowstring does not simply yield—it steels itself, preparing for the force that will be imposed upon it.
This is Wat’s own dynamic with history.
- The hand is power, ideology, the state, the system.
- The bowstring is the captive, the exile, the poet who has no choice but to tense under force.
There is no resistance, no rebellion. There is only the tension of inevitability.
The Arrow as the Exile, the Flight Toward Fate
The bowstring whispers to the shaft:
O arrow, flee!
The arrow to the bowstring calls:
Unshackle me!
Here, the dynamic shifts. The arrow wants to be released. It wants to escape the tension that holds it back.
But this is not freedom.
The moment the arrow is loosed, its fate is fixed. It has only one path, only one possible ending.
This is Wat’s entire existence:
- Cast from belief into exile.
- Cast from poetry into testimony.
- Cast from the world into history.
He was never free—he was flung across the century like an arrow, unable to alter his course.
The Target as the End of the Journey
The arrow sings unto the mark:
Burn, beacon bright!
The target murmurs, soft and dark:
Love me, mid-flight.
This is the most chilling moment in the poem.
The target does not resist. It calls the arrow to itself.
There is no battle, no struggle—only acceptance, inevitability, even intimacy.
This is death, exile, the final impact.
The hunted and the hunter are the same.
“Tat Twam Asi”—The Collapse of Boundaries
The mark to arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:
Tat twam asi—
“I am thou,” no more, no less.
Here, the poem steps into philosophy, into fate, into the dissolution of self.
The hand, the bow, the arrow, the target—they are all one.
There is no distinction between:
- The one who fires and the one who is struck.
- The oppressor and the oppressed.
- The believer and the betrayed.
Wat had lived on all sides of history.
And in the end, all are absorbed into the same motion, the same fate.
The Christian Coda: A Whisper of Mercy
(A Christian’s coda, scrawled aside:
O Virgin bright,
Guard the mark, the shaft, the flight—
And the hand that bends the bow this night.)
And yet, at the very last moment, there is a whisper of prayer.
This is the contradiction of Wat:
- The man who saw the cruelty of history still hoped for grace.
- The poet who lost faith still whispered prayers.
- The man flung into exile still longed for protection.
The poem does not answer the question—is the prayer heard? Does the Virgin guard the arrow?
But it leaves us with that last fragile breath of hope.
Wat’s Legacy: The Arrow Still in Flight
Aleksander Wat did not live to see justice, redemption, or peace. He was a poet who saw too much, suffered too much, survived too much.
But his words remain.
And like the bowstring drawn tight in “Japanese Archery,” they remain unbroken, tense, waiting for release.
He was both the hunter and the hunted, the arrow and the mark.
And in the silence after impact, his words still whisper:
“Tat twam asi—I am thou.”
