As such, gawęda is characterized not only by its generally oral or quasi-oral style (hence its colloquial vocabulary, its dynamic, free-flowing, but often convoluted syntax, and its rich use of auditory—that is, phonetic, rhythmic, and inflectional—features of speech) and by its reproduction of the authentic oratory patterns of the typical nobleman from the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (hence frequent Latinisms, ornate flourishes, and the lavish use of rhetorical devices), but also by its specific audience. The fact that such a tale was, for all its oratory, performed in front of a small group of listeners in domestic circumstances gave gawęda a certain homespun, nonprofessional, but also personal and intimate tone. The fact that the listeners were, as a rule, well-disposed friends, neighbors, and family members representing the same social class, educational background, and cultural taste resulted in the characteristically shorthandlike quality of the narrative, which could easily do without laborious introductions, aside explanations, and detailed references, since the audience knew all there was to know anyway. On the other hand, the fact that every gawęda was supposed to exist first and foremost as an oral performance was intrinsic to its composition: since the narrator performed live, the tale must never slow down or get overgrown with tiring details. Not unlike the present-day stand-up comedian, the typical gawędziarz realized that a single yawn in the audience could be his undoing. Therefore, his listeners had to be bombarded by a continuous barrage of flowery expressions, vivid images, dramatically presented scenes, sensational facts, intriguing suspense effects, and rhetorical devices aimed at maintaining contact with the audience or reviving its flagging interest.
The above-mentioned features conspired to create the immediately recognizable style of the gawęda—a style so potent, by the way, that it tended to spread and engulf other narrative genres, sometimes producing interesting hybrids. The title of the famous Memoirs of the seventeenth-century nobleman Jan Chryzostom Pasek, for instance, is only partly justified: even though the narrator mostly looks back into the past, he nonetheless shares his reminiscences with the reader in the characteristic gawęda style, one as colloquial and spontaneous as if he were describing events actually taking place in his presence.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the vicissitudes of Polish political history added another twist to the gawęda’s popularity: after the third, and final, partition of Poland among the neighboring powers in 1795, gawęda came to symbolize for many writers what was most original, unique, and, for all its parochial obscurantism, endearing in the traditional Sarmatian culture. Nostalgia for the sunk Atlantis of Poland’s provincial gentry resulted not only in a renewed interest in the works of Pasek and other old Polish gawędziarze, but also in imitations and pastiches that offered the illusion of retrieving the lost world by recreating its literary style.
One minor and one major masterpiece of Polish literature emerged in the 1830s as a result of the gawęda’s association with this conservative utopia. Written in 1830–32, Henryk Rzewuski’s Pamiątki Soplicy (Soplica’s reminiscences) brilliantly imitates the gawęda style to create a vivid, panoramic, and in some ways disturbing portrayal of gentry life. (Soplica, the narrator/protagonist of this sequence of tales, is a fictitious nobleman with connections at the court of the powerful real-life magnate Radziwill.) To Rzewuski’s credit, his ultraconservative opinions did not prevent him from offering, through his naively apologetic and blindly self-assured narrator, a sobering account of the ills that had brought old Poland to ruin.
Rzewuski’s collection occupies a special niche in Polish literary history on the strength of having been one of a few books that inspired Adam Mickiewicz to create the epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), arguably the most famous literary work in the Polish language. Dubbed “the Bible of Polishness” by a modern critic, Pan Tadeusz is a nostalgic yet warmly ironic portrayal of life in a gentry manor in the depths of the Lithuanian woods on the eve of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. It was written and published in exile, in the same Paris where, about 120 years later, the novel of another exile, this one living in Argentina, brought the sequence of the gawęda’s literary reincarnations to its triumphant yet highly self-ironic conclusion.
Thus sketched, the literary tradition that stretches from Pasek to Gombrowicz reveals one regularity: each new phase of the gawęda’s transformation increases the ironic distance between narrator and author. In Pasek, the author was the narrator: all the beliefs that the narrator of Memoirs stands for and all the opinions he expresses are without doubt those of Pasek himself. A distinct hiatus appears in Rzewuski, who, however, does little more than distance himself from his narrator, letting him speak and freely reveal his mind’s characteristic idiosyncrasies, limitations, and biases. Mickiewicz goes one step farther: he also employs a naive narrator, but the implied presence of his own beliefs and opinions manifests itself in numerous subtle yet unmistakable ways, through the varying degrees of irony with which he treats the narrator.
Gombrowicz, at first glance, seems to have returned to Pasek’s old ways: does not his narrator bear the name of Witold Gombrowicz? Is he not going, at least initially, through the experiences that, to the best of our knowledge, the author himself went through in real life? This, however, is merely Gombrowicz’s ploy. He endows his narrator with his own name and his own real-life experiences only to surprise us with the jarring incongruity between the narrator’s identity and the speech he uses consistently in his narrative monologue. The modern Polish writer is telling us, his modern readers, what happened to him after his arrival in Buenos Aires aboard a modern transatlantic liner, but he is doing so in the gawęda style of an old Polish nobleman: the only reaction can be a burst of laughter.
This is precisely the reaction Trans-Atlantyk was designed to provoke. After all, the grand finale of the novel is a gigantic burst of laughter. As Gombrowicz put it years later in his book of conversations with Dominique de Roux (published in English as A Kind of Testament), it was the grim hopelessness of Poland’s mid-century ordeal under Hitler and Stalin that spurred him to seek a way out of the perennial Polish dilemma by imploding with laughter the very Form of being a Pole, the stereotype of “Polishness” as a mixture of martyrdom and empty gesture, a vicious circle of calls for compassion and pretenses of grandeur. His usual attitude of distancing himself from the Form has not changed at all in Trans-Atlantyk; rather, it focuses more specifically on “the national Form” in order “to wrest the Pole from Poland, so that he may become just a human being.”
In 1953 this undertaking put Gombrowicz smack in the middle of a veritable minefield of national complexes and neuroses. It is to the eternal credit of the émigré publisher Jerzy Giedroyc and his Institut Littéraire that the novel came out then at all. Even the authority of the popular poet and novelist Józef Wittlin (himself an exile in New York), who wrote a preface for the book’s first edition, could not save Trans-Atlantyk from the émigré public’s outrage. The critics’ responses ranged from contemptuous dismissals to uncontrolled fury. One of the most intriguing ironies of post-1945 Polish literature has been, however, the enormous difference between the rather predictable reaction of the émigré community (after all, for an exile, laughing at stereotypes of “Polishness” is more often than not tantamount to ridiculing the very value system that helps him overcome isolation among his host society) and the reception of Trans-Atlantyk in Poland itself. The political “thaw” of 1956 brought about the publication of several of Gombrowicz’s books in Poland, by state-owned publishing houses and with the censor’s official though short-lived blessing. Trans-Atlantyk appeared in 1957 and immediately became a modern classic, in spite of the modest printing of ten thousand copies. (Like the 1953 Paris edition, it was paired with the drama Ślub [The marriage].) It would be an exaggeration to say that its popularity spread beyond the cultural elite of Poland at that time; its impact, however, was lasting, especially among the young people who were its most ardent admirers. It was the novel’s profound, Rabelaisian hilarity, its
masterful way of bursting the bubbles of pomposity by inflating them beyond the limits of endurance, its irreverence toward grand words and sacrosanct myths, that gave many of us the mental fortitude to resist the totalitarian temptation, whether of the nationalistic or the communist variety.
One personal reminiscence involving Trans-Atlantyk will probably stick in my mind as long as I live. Faced with the nauseating prospect of taking the final exam in the course on Marxist political economy that all university students were then required to take, five friends of mine, Polish literature majors like myself, late one evening in May 1967 squeezed into my tiny room in downtown Poznań, purportedly to spend the night collectively cramming. None of us had opened the textbook before, although the examination was scheduled for the next morning. One of my guests vented his feelings: “OK, guys, it’s obvious that the only thing we need to know for the exam is that Karl Marx was right, but we still could use some vocabulary to say it in at least a dozen different ways. What do you think? Can we manage this and still get an hour of sleep?” To relieve the tension, I answered by quoting my favorite line from Trans-Atlantyk: “I’m not so mad as to have any views These Days or not to have them.” The roar of laughter that ensued convinced us that before we got down to serious work, we needed a couple of minutes of entertainment to clear our minds and lift our spirits. I reached for my dog-eared copy of Gombrowicz and read aloud the first two paragraphs. We took turns until dawn, one of us reading and the other five laughing ourselves to exhaustion, while our textbooks of Marxist political economy lay forgotten on the floor, never to be opened by any of us again.
Naturally, we all passed the exam that morning.
Stanislaw Baranczak
Translators’ Note
In 1977, when we first considered our approach to Trans-Atlantyk, it soon became clear that we would not produce a conventional translation. The aim of literary translation is to make a foreign-language work into one of our own. But if we had tried to turn Trans-Atlantyk into either a modern English historical novel with archaisms (Barth, Burgess) or a period novel (Sterne), we would have lost more than we gained: namely, the Polish essence of the work, embodied in its unique style. Trans-Atlantyk is simply too Polish to be Englished, at least for the general reader. Moreover, to impose any literary form on this piece would be contrary to the central tenet of Gombrowicz’s aesthetic.
Certainly with the publication of Trans-Atlantyk Gombrowicz proclaimed himself an intellectual maverick indifferent to readership. In A Kind of Testament he writes:
Trans-Atlantyk was such folly, from every point of view! To think that I wrote something like that, just when I was isolated on the American continent, without a penny, deserted by God and men! In my position it was important to write something quickly which could be translated and published in foreign languages. Or, if I wanted to write something for Poles, something which didn’t injure their national pride. And I dared—the very height of irresponsibility!—to fabricate a novel which was inaccessible to foreigners because of its linguistic difficulties and which was a deliberate provocation of the Polish émigrés, the only readership on which I could rely!
Indeed, Trans-Atlantyk contained something to offend everyone. Not only did it baffle would-be translators, but it was hard to read in Polish. Many a Polish admirer of Gombrowicz today confesses not to have read it. What is more, it didn’t seem to take itself seriously. With the war on and Poland in real danger, Gombrowicz should, he says, have written “something serious.” But when he sat down to write: “Instead of something serious—laughter, idiocies, somersaults, fun!” In fact, he acknowledges that “it was precisely this playful quality in Trans-Atlantyk which constituted its greatest provocation.”
With this frank confession before us, how could we follow the example of the faithful but solemn German translation, or of the charming but inconsequential French adaptation (from which we borrowed Filistria)? If Gombrowicz would take such risks to maintain the integrity of his vision, how could we do less? What we had to do was to discover a very elastic style (or nonstyle) comprehending the archaic language, skewed and fragmented syntax, and unruly spirit of the original Polish that would be intelligible, even enjoyable, in English. Here was a superbly original mind at play in the field of language. We simply had to “let him out, give him free rein, let him frisk,” and go with him wherever he led us—not only into incomparable imaginative flights, but into tortured syntax, ubiquitous repetition, anachronisms, inconsistencies, crude expressions, nonsense. Then our style would come.
We evolved a method of working together. Carolyn French, who did not know Polish, brought to the translation her scholar’s knowledge of English literature, especially the literature of the seventeenth century, and her awareness of the flexibility of the English language. We worked together on the novel, discussing (often at length) each word in all its nuances, each structure, often reading aloud our English passages to test for sound. We consulted a great many texts, but the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary was our primary reference book.
Our first decision was not to use nineteenth-century English, though the much admired German translation (at that time the only one available) was set linguistically in that period. Gombrowicz wanted to create a showcase for baroque Polish, which he considered a richer, more vital language than that of the modern age. At the same time he mocked with parody the grandiose, romantic, sentimental “literary” language of nineteenth-century writers because it was so unlike the ordinary speech of real people. The old Polish gawęda, a literary genre that imitates spoken narrative, was the ideal vehicle for his purpose, and it was our belief that the language of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England would best translate the novel that resulted. In seventeenth-century England there was not yet a literary language apart from poetry; English prose authors wrote the way they spoke. In the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, in Urquhart’s great translation of Rabelais, as well as in the lesser prose works of the period—Aubrey’s Brief Lives or Aphra Benn’s plays, for example—refinement and vulgarity of expression coexist as they do in Trans-Atlantyk. The period was best for our translation not only because of its language, but because we could portray grotesque characters and events as distant from our own time and therefore a bit more credible. Of course, when Gombrowicz strays from his period, we stray too—and at times, of necessity, we stray alone.
Our choice of period had its drawbacks. Seventeenth-century Polish is much closer to modern Polish than is seventeenth-century English to modern English. For this reason we usually translate metaphors literally rather than attempting to translate the meaning, which in many cases would have no equivalent in the language of our period. Metaphors resonate beyond their idiomatic meanings at the time of conception and are, in a sense, timeless.
Some passages in Trans-Atlantyk are triumphs of sound over sense. It was important for us to preserve the musicality of the Polish original. We have tried to keep the repetitive rhythms, refrains, alliteration, and rhyme as well as the imagery that lifts the prose to poetic (or mock-poetic) heights. Insofar as possible we have adhered to the original punctuation and capitalization in order to preserve the sketchy, sometimes elliptical “shorthand” style of the gawęda. Archaic words are rendered in archaic spelling, as are a few nonarchaic words like show and while, to suggest that we are flirting with the antique style but not wed to it. The novel does not make easy reading; it was not intended to do so. We have made few compromises for ease of comprehension.
One of our major obstacles was the enormous difference in cultures to be bridged. The central father/son metaphor, for example, did not translate. Whether England or America, ours has always been the “motherland,” and since 1939 the “fatherland” has been Nazi Germany. Worse, present-day associations would impart to “fatherland” and “sonland” a kind of Disneyland banality at which Gombrowicz would have shuddered. Better, we thought, to use Latin words, in keeping with the gawęda and much less offensive to the ear. As for the wealth of
parody, another obstacle, we found that if we translated accurately, the resulting exaggerations would be funny even to one not acquainted with the writers being parodied. The “empty, empty” refrain could, in fact, be a send-up of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
Gombrowicz’s verbs presented problems. Our rich treasury of verbs is the staple of English literature, but Trans-Atlantyk gave us precious little chance to exploit it. Gombrowicz uses the same simple verbs (walk, drink, go, show) over and over again, not only as verbs but as nouns, adjectives, refrains. The sound is somewhat varied in Polish because all parts of speech are inflected, but even when repetition is done for rhythmic effect, we had to use every ploy to avoid monotony in English. More difficult to overcome were the abrupt changes in tense—from present to past and back to present in one sentence—quite natural in Polish, not so in English. Here we had to compromise by regulating these changes so as to preserve both the casual gawęda style and the English reader’s sanity.
Finally, there were words that had no real English equivalents: gówniarz and bajbak. The first, a term of contempt implying childish inadequacy, we translated by inventing the word “chitshit” (with a dot for delicacy where Gombrowicz uses three) to lighten the common English epithet. Bajbak (pronounced BUY-bahk, derived from the Ukranian bobak, meaning idler, lazy fellow) is an obscure Polish word, probably chosen by Gombrowicz partly because its very obscurity allows it to suggest more than the literal meaning would imply. We could have translated it with an even more obscure English dialect word bibach (from the Orkney Islands by way of Byelorussia), but this would only have compounded the reader’s difficulty and necessitated a lengthy footnote. We chose instead to leave the word in Polish.
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