Gombrowicz was no more than a name to me until I read this new translation of his last novel, first published in 1965. It is an extraordinary piece of work, placing him firmly in the middle of mid-century European avant-garde thought, especially in France, where he spent his last years; marooned in Argentina in 1939 by the War, he never returned to Poland. Danuta Borchardt, the prizewinning translator of this volume, writes a three-page introduction explaining the difficulties she encountered. In some ways, I resented this, feeling that translation should ideally be invisible. But I was also glad of it, for I would not otherwise have realized that Gombrowicz's extraordinary tricks of style -- ranging from strings of disconnected words to made-up baby language -- were his and not his translator's. Here, from the first page, is an example of the former style: "Sweat. I'm behind him, pant legs, heels, sand, we're plodding on, plodding on, ruts, clods of dirt, glassy pebbles flashing, the glare, the heat humming, quivering, everything is black in the sunlight, cottages, fences, fields, woods, the road, this march, from where, what for, a lot could be said, actually...." And here an ejaculation of the latter kind: "Cool on top but ready to pop! You, sir, are berging my daughter for yourself! With an on-the-sly berg, with a lovey-doveyberg, and you, my dearie sir, would like to bemberg yourself right under her skirt and straight into her marriage as the lovieberg number one! Ti-ri-ti! Ti-ri-ti!" Words gone wild.
Plot? Yes, sort of. The narrator, a young man also called Witold, hikes into the Polish countryside with an acquaintance for a two-week stay in a family pension. On the way, they come upon a dead sparrow hanged by a string from a branch; the door is opened by a woman with a twisted lip; and they are shown by mistake into a room where the daughter of the house is sleeping. Out of these ingredients, Witold constructs a fantasy world in which the slightest detail -- a stain on a wall, a casual gesture, a scrap of overheard conversation -- is incorporated into a web of suggestion simultaneously sinister and erotic. And all so French: the deliberate implausibility is akin to absurdism; the obsessive use of detail is like the nouveau roman; Witold's detachment from reality has overtones of existentialism; his manipulation of language (so that, for instance, two things are connected simply by the fact of their having nothing in common) parallels deconstructionism. Enough! There is a kind of paranoia here that sucks you into its horrible web. Witold's untrammeled stream of consciousness is not so much introspective -- it is nowhere near objective enough for that -- as involuted or (as the translator remarks) onanistic. Indeed, as the story develops into an erotically-charged excursion into the mountains, the entire tale surges towards some kind of self-induced sexual climax, explosive but ultimately pointless.
Did I enjoy it? No. But I am fascinated by the reminder of how radical the sixties avant garde could be, intrigued to hear French ideas in a Polish accent, and disturbed by the thought of what political, philosophical, or personal turmoil could have produced such spiritual dislocation.
