Synopsis
This is the first English translation of Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz, one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. Trans-Atlantyk, a semi-autobiographical, satirical novel, is based on the author's experience of being caught in Argentina at the outbreak of World War II. At odds with the Argentinean literary world and with Polish emigre society, Gombrowicz explores the modern predicament of exile and displacement in a disintegrating world.
BookList
Of Gombrowicz's four novels, only "Trans-Atlantyk" had not been translated into English. This first English version of a difficult, dyspeptic, bitter triumph of black wit and literary style shows why it took so long. Often considered Poland's greatest twentieth-century author, Gombrowicz was skeptical of Polish nationalism and wrote "Trans-Atlantyk" in the form of a "gaweda"--an anachronistic and provincial literary genre favored by lesser Polish gentry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--in order to show nationalism's irrelevance to the modern world. The resultant archaic style is well served by the translators' synthetic seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English. Semiautobiographical, the work is based on Gombrowicz's initial experiences of exile in Buenos Aires. Stranded in Argentina by the outbreak of war, Gombrowicz found himself at odds with the insular world of Polish exiles there as well as with Argentine literati. The picaresque plot, improbable as a Marx Brothers comedy, concerns the consequences of a soiree held by the Polish legation and traces Gombrowicz's involvement in a duel between a plutocratic Argentine pederast, Gonzalo, and the father of one of his intended victims, a retired Polish major.