Celebrating Witold Gombrowicz

Abstract

centenary of Witold Gombrowicz's birth was celebrated in 2004 amid worldwide testimonials to his importance as a writer. Fame did not come early or easily to Gombrowicz, although his hunger for it was the driving force of his life. Of the three works he published while still living in Poland the minor story collection Pamietnik z okresu dojrzezvania (1933; A memoir from adolescence); the absurdist costume drama Iwona, ksiezniczka Burgunda (1938; Eng. Ivona, Princess ofBurgundia, 1970) on the theme of otherness; and his first novel, Ferdydurke (1938; Eng. Ferdydurke, 1961) only Ferdydurke evoked any reader response. A demolition of traditional Polish values and a vehicle for his ideas on the tyranny of Form over Life, the novel remains Gombrowicz's best-known text. As if driven from Poland by the furor it raised, Gombrowicz in 1939 eagerly joined a journalist friend covering the maiden voyage of the Polish liner Batory to Buenos Aires. They reached Argentina a few weeks before the German invasion of Poland. However, the kind of reflexive heroism Gombrowicz rejected in his writings negated a return to Europe and participation in the liberation of Poland. Barely knowing Spanish, and dependent financially on contacts in the Polish emigre community in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz nevertheless remained in Argentina for nearly twenty-four years. Ignored by, and ignoring, the Argentine literary establishment (as indeed virtually any other aspect of Argentinean life and culture), Gombrowicz built an alternative life around a small group of young Argentines that he encountered in Buenos Aires cafes. With their assistance, he published a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke in 1947; it marked, in a sense, the beginning of his international career. Subsequent publication of Gombrowicz's works in Polish in the cultural journal Kultura, issued by the Paris-based Polish emigre Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute), opened a broader readership. By 1963, when a Ford Fellowship to Berlin made possible his return to Europe, Gombrowicz had published his best play, Slub (The marriage; originally published in Spanish in Buenos Aires in 1948), a dreamlike Shakespearean parody with a World War II setting; the novel Trans-Atlantyk (first published in Kultura in 1953, together with The Marriage); the first part of his Dziennik, 1953-1956 (1957; Diary); the intriguing novel Pornografia (i960; Eng. Pornografia, 1966); and the second part of Dziennik, 1957-1961 (1962). Apart from the first two portions of his delightful and engrossing diary, which many regard as the richest fruit of his Argentinean exile, the only other significant book by Gombrowicz from this period is his masterful novel Trans-Atlantyk (1953), a Rabelaisian account of his early years in Argentina, written in a parody of the old Polish gentry oral narrative. Witold Gombrowicz I