TWO LINES ONLINE: Danuta Borchardt on Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz

(We've just published an extract from Danuta Borchardt's translation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Trans-Atlantyk in the June 2011 installment of TWO LINES Online. To help contextualize this work, today we have a post from Borchardt.)

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was a Polish writer on the forefront of the existential movement of Western literature. His first novel, Ferdydurke was, in a funny and iconoclastic way, an exposition of that movement, and it antedated Sartre’s Nausea by one year. Gombrowicz maintained that immaturity is our creative force, and while adherence to form shackles us, chaos does not liberate us.

He wrote four other novels: The Possessed (this one anonymously as an attempt to write a bad novel well!), Trans-Atlantyk, Pornografia, and Cosmos (for which he won the prestigious International Editors Award), as well as several plays and short stories. His most important nonfiction work is his three-volume Diary, a collection of essays on philosophy, art, psychology, politics. In 1967 he was a runner-up for the Nobel Prize. His works were translated into many languages. Unfortunately his novels Ferdydurke, Pornografia, and Cosmos were translated into English not directly from the Polish but from Spanish, French, and German, and thus did not gain as wide a readership in this language as they did in other languages. These novels are now available translated directly from the Polish, through the work that I have pursued since 1990s.

Trans-Atlantyk was written in Buenos Aires, where Gombrowicz was stranded during World War II. He wrote it as a satire on the Polish émigré community there, but his ideas are universal and can be applied to any community. It is a clarion call to Poles to abandon that aspect of their Polishness that has rendered them impotent in the face of ever present political adversities. The novel is uproariously funny, but, because the plot takes place during the war, there are tragic rumblings throughout.

Gombrowicz wrote the novel in historical variants of the Polish language, from baroque to the 19th century, as well as in the peasant and present-day vernacular. The style is that of a gawęda, an old-style chat, which is also known as a contemporary fireside chat. It is meant to be told, not written.

The previous translation by Carolyn French and Nina Karsov was directly from the Polish. It is a valiant attempt at dealing with this most difficult text. But, contrary to Gombrowicz’s journey through various centuries, these translators mostly worked in the English baroque. The language skips and bumps in a way that is often arduous to read and thus loses the speed and fluidity of a spoken tale. It also lacks enough contrast in the shifts between comedy and tragedy.

The first translation of Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk was published seventeen years ago (in 1994) by Yale University Press. I have decided that the novel, considered by some to be Gombrowicz’s best, deserves another try at translation. This is fitting, for in their Translators’ Note, French and Karsov graciously express the hope that "ours will not be the last translation of this unique and important work."