Ferdydurke Read Free Page A

(nor any others that I considered) adequately conveys the sense in which Gombrowicz uses "pupa" in the text. While the "mug" is Gombrowicz's metaphor for the destructive elements in human relationships, the pupa is his metaphor for the gentle, insidious, but definite infantilizing and humiliation that we inflict on one another. We made the decision to stay with the Polish word.
    Ferdydurke is a tragi-farce, in which events are often tragic and comic at the same time, and in which the mug and the pupa are the metaphors for violence and belittlement. Names of body parts are given meaning beyond the usual, often through wordplay. This wordplay is, whenever possible, translated literally. Some plays on words are impossible to translate—for example, Gombrowicz uses the fact that the Polish term for fingers and toes is same word to create wordplay between "fingers" and "tiptoeing."
    I had to bear in mind that in English the sequence of words is crucial to meaning, whereas in Polish there is a more complicated grammar that clarifies the meaning of a sentence. Mishaps such as "he threw his mother from the train a kiss" do not occur in Polish.
    Gombrowicz delighted, it seems, in compressing the abstract into the concrete: it is not the thought of the farmhand but the farmhand himself that "paints the morning in bright and pleasant colors," or, "she was generally a bit disgusted with mother," instead of "mothering."
    Gombrowicz's long sentences and paragraphs, frequent use of dashes, and his grouping of entire conversations into single paragraphs were part of his style, and I preserved these. The same applies to his repeating a word rather than providing its synonym; by doing so he evokes a sense of emphasis and rhythm.
    I was equally faithful to Gombrowicz's changes of tense between past and present in the same paragraph and even in the same sentence. The metamorphosis of a thirty-year-old man into a teenager is often indicated by past tense becoming present. Also, the change of tense imbues the story with a surreal sense of time.
    In translating idioms I sometimes had to use an English one that had the same meaning as the Polish but was entirely different. For z palca— "from the finger"—I substituted "out of thin air." However, the English idiom "the end justifies the means" was changed to "the end sanctifies the means," preserving a nuance of the Polish.
    In Polish, the use of diminutives imparts, in many instances, an aura of affectation and artificiality, and they often sound ridiculous. Gombrowicz spared no effort in pointing this out by his frequent and exaggerated use of diminutives. I have tried to capture this with diminutive adjectives, as in "cute little head," or by using the ending "-ie."
    In Poland, French was not the language of the aristocracy, as it had been in Russia until the early 1800s, but the occasional use of French and other languages was, nonetheless, a common affectation and a fruitful field for Gombrowicz's satire. I have followed Gombrowicz in not offering a translation of familiar foreign words and phrases.
    Two important names—Kneadus (from the verb "to knead") and Youngblood—were translated into English because they have definite connotations in Polish that contribute to the meaning of the tale. The title itself, Ferdydurke, has no meaning in Polish, although there is some conjecture that the word was a contraction and alteration of the name Freddy Durkee, the chief character in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, which was widely read in Poland in the early 1930s. Gombrowicz himself never explained the title.
    Gombrowicz has presented us with a remarkable novel in a bold and innovative style—with élan, humor, beauty. No translation is final, but it was incumbent on me to make a valiant effort to transfer the original text to the English-speaking reader with fidelity and with the verve inherent in the original; my guiding principle was to approach Gombrowicz with humility and the reader with