Ferdydurke Read Free Page B

audacity.
    The following texts were used in this translation.
    Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (Paris: Institut Littéraire, 1969). Includes changes by Gombrowicz.
    Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, translated into English by Eric Mosbacher (London, 1961).
    Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, translated into French by George Sédir (Paris, 1973).
    Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, translated into Spanish, based on 1947 translation (Buenos Aires, 1964).
    Gombrowicz, Polish Reminiscences and Travels Through Argentina (in Polish).
    Gombrowicz, Diary (in Polish).
    Michal Glowihski, Witold Gombrowicz's "Ferdydurke" (in Polish).

Acknowledgments
    It is my pleasure to acknowledge the unfailing support of Professor Stanislaw Baranczak in this difficult and challenging endeavor. Coming from such an esteemed translator, it meant a great deal to me. When I cried to high heaven for succor, he always gave me encouragement and valuable suggestions.
    My gratitude also goes out to my husband, Thom Lane, whose familiarity with American colloquial English and slang, as well as his wide reading of European literature, were of great assistance to me. He also helped me clarify complex passages through his mindful reading of my translation drafts.
    I also want to thank Dr. Richard Fenigsen for his careful verification of my translation from the Polish, and for his helpful remarks.
    No less appreciation is due my family, friends, and colleagues for their support during the long process of the translation, and for their comments.
    And, last but not least, I want to thank Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press for his willingness to let this work reach the light of day.
    D.B.

1 Abduction
    Tuesday morning I awoke at that pale and lifeless hour when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own. Awakened suddenly, I wanted to take a taxi and dash to the railroad station, thinking I was due to leave, when, in the next minute, I realized to my chagrin that no train was waiting for me at the station, that no hour had struck. I lay in the murky light while my body, unbearably frightened, crushed my spirit with fear, and my spirit crushed my body, whose tiniest fibers cringed in apprehension that nothing would ever happen, nothing ever change, that nothing would ever come to pass, and whatever I undertook, nothing, but nothing, would ever come of it. It was the dread of nonexistence, the terror of extinction, it was the angst of nonlife, the fear of unreality, a biological scream of all my cells in the face of an inner disintegration when all would be blown to pieces and scattered to the winds. It was the fear of unseemly pettiness and mediocrity, the fright of distraction, panic at fragmentation, the dread of rape from within and of rape that was threatening me from without—but most important, there was something on my heels at all times, something that I would call a sense of inner, intermolecular mockery and derision, an inbred superlaugh of my bodily parts and the analogous parts of my spirit, all running wild.
    The fear had been generated by a dream that plagued me through the night, and finally woke me. The dream took me back to my youth, a reversal in time that should be forbidden to nature, and I saw myself as I was at fifteen or sixteen, standing on a rock near a mill by a river, my face to the wind, and I heard myself saying something, I heard my long-buried, roosterlike squeaky little voice, I saw my features that were not yet fully formed, my nose that was too small, my hands that were too large—I felt the unpleasant texture of that intermediate, passing phase of development. I woke up laughing and terrified both, because I thought that the thirty-year-old man I am today was aping and ridiculing the callow juvenile I once was, while he in turn was aping me and, by the same token, each of us was aping himself. Oh, wretched memory that compels us to remember the paths we took to arrive at the present state of affairs! Further: as I lay awake but still half