Ricerc@Sapienza

On the basis of his Italian translation entitled Il mio secolo of Aleksander Wat’s Mój wiek (Palermo 2013) and the idea of translation as “listening” and response/responsibility of identification with the Other, the author returns to Wat’s prison memories and linked thoughts on the subject of time. The prisoner’s isolation, on the one hand, demonstrates the inherent “otherness” of human time (inasmuch as it is a form of “being” – Heidegger’s Dasein – “with others”) making his perception of reality similar to that of a dying person. Referring to the philosophical and hermeneutic ideas of time which, starting with St. Augustine lead on to Bergson, Proust, Eliot, Husserl and Heidegger, we discover that prison reveals to those who undergo it all the painful, grandiose complexity and “impurity” of human time, just as the imminence of death can disentangle the true meaning of life, which is what art has always and for ever attempted to grasp and explain even to the most absent minded of receivers.