Ferdydurke Read Free

to try to avoid all expressions of themselves; to guard against all their beliefs, and to mistrust their feelings; above all, to stop identifying themselves with what defines them, could hardly fail to insist that he, Gombrowicz, was not that book. Indeed, he has to be inferior to it. "The work, transformed into culture, hovered in the sky, while I remained below." Like the great backside that hovers high above the protagonist's half-hearted flight into normality at the end of the novel, Ferdydurke has floated upward to the literary empyrean. Long live its sublime mockery of all attempts to normalize desire . . . and the reach of great literature.

Translator's Note
    For several years the question has been whether Ferdydurke could be translated into comprehensible English, and if so, would it still be Ferdydurke? Ferdydurke was published in Poland in 1937 and translated into Spanish in 1947 in Buenos Aires, the result of a collaboration between Gombrowicz and his Hispanic literary friends. In the early 1960s it was translated into French and German. An English version was derived from the French, German, and possibly the Spanish translations, but some of the most beautiful and important passages were omitted. This is the first unabridged English translation, and it is taken directly from Gombrowicz's original text. I hope that it will establish that it is possible to translate Ferdydurke, at least for the most part.
    I arrived at the task of translating Ferdydurkeby a circuitous route. I was born in Poland, and my mother tongue is the language in which Gombrowicz was creating his works and on which he was already exerting an influence. I began to learn English at the age of thirteen when, as a refugee during World War II, I found myself living in England and Ireland. I settled in the United States in 1959
    and began, some years later, to write short stories in English—rather idiosyncratic in content and style—and discovered an affinity with Gombrowicz's writing. After reading Gombrowicz's last novel, Cosmos, in Polish, I thought that it would sound beautiful in English. I translated the first chapter of Cosmos, as well as some of Gombrowicz's short stories, and began to explore the possibilities of having them published. This brought me into contact with publishers and scholars, and with Gombrowicz's widow, Rita Gombrowicz. They all encouraged me to translate Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz's first major work.
    I decided at the outset to use American rather than British English because it is less formal and therefore better suited to Gombrowicz's style. My own English is influenced by my having learned it in London and Dublin. For this reason, and also because the translation was going to be from a native language to an acquired one, it became apparent that I would need the assistance of a born speaker of American English. My husband's reviews of the many drafts proved to be most useful in this respect. In some instances, however, when he would interject, "But we don't say it this way," my reply would be, "In Polish we don't either; it's pure Gombrowicz"—and this would be the final court of appeal. Clearly I was dealing with yet another language: Gombrowicz's Polish.
    Gombrowicz had availed himself of four idioms: colloquial Polish; literary Polish; the language of the intelligentsia and the landed gentry; and the language of the peasantry. But he also introduced his own idiosyncrasies by playing with and on words, by changing nouns into verbs and adjectives, by using unusual phraseology, and by inventing new forms, some of which have entered colloquial Polish. Had I not worked as a psychiatrist with English-speaking schizophrenics who invent their own languages, I may not have felt comfortable "neologizing" English in such crucial words and phrases as "proffed" and "he had dealt me the pupa" The Polish word pupa (pronounced "poopa") presented a special problem. It means the buttocks, behind, bum, tush, rump, but not one of these