Pornografia Read online

  PORNOGRAFIA

  Other Works by Witold Gombrowicz

  Ferdydurke

  Cosmos

  Trans-Atlantyk

  Possessed

  A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

  Bacacay

  A Kind of Testament

  Diary

  Polish Memories

  Marriage

  Ivona, Princess Burgunda

  Operetta

  PORNOGRAFIA

  Witold Gombrowicz

  Translated from the Polish

  by

  Danuta Borchardt

  Copyright © 1966 by Witold Gombrowicz

  Translation copyright © 2009 by Danuta Borchardt

  Foreword copyright © 2009 by Sam Lipsyte

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected]

  Originally published in the Polish language by Instytut Literacki (Kultura) in Paris, France, under the title Pornografia, copyright © 1960.

  First Grove Press edition published in 1978, together with Ferdydurke.

  Published simultaneaously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9528-9

  This publication has been funded by the

  Book Institute-the ©POLAND Translation Program

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  Foreword

  by Sam Lipsyte

  The story sounds like the set-up for a very dark joke. It is 1939, the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Somewhat oblivious to the coming catastrophe (like most everyone else), a writer from Warsaw accepts an invitation for an ocean cruise to South America. He’ll be back in a few months, refreshed for his next project. But once he sets sail there is a slight problem with his itinerary: World War Two. Trapped in Buenos Aires with little money and no Spanish, the writer forges a life there for over two decades. Though he eventually returns to Europe, he never sees Poland, the country that formed (and infuriated) him, again.

  Such was the odd fate of Witold Gombrowicz, one of the major writers of the modern age, though readers in the United States have not heard enough about him. International acclaim came late to Gombrowicz, with the French translation of his first published novel, Ferdydurke (1937). This masterpiece takes on more than a few literary forms in its hilarious skewering of European philosophy, cultural upheaval, and generational struggle. It remains one of the funniest books of an unfunny century.

  Pornografia (1960), published over twenty years later, mirrors many of the earlier novel’s themes, but in many ways it is a strikingly different work from Ferdydurke. It is also possibly a better one, tauter, its contents under more ferocious pressure, its savagery and comedy more directed. Narrated by a delightfully disturbing and nuanced man named (why not?) Witold Gombrowicz, Pornografia embraces an array of corrosive conflicts, between boys and girls, children and grown-ups, anarchy and the law, inferiority (life) and superiority (death), and competing versions of the real. (When the categories begin to deform and melt together, of course, things get truly, intriguingly, dicey.) Another opposition thrown into the pot is war and, if not peace, then a maddening state of not-yet-war. The latter seems especially important because Pornografia is set in a relatively calm pocket of Nazi-ravaged Poland, a place Gombrowicz never knew, and its plot consists of the erotic manipulations of a pair of would-be resistance fighters upon some increasingly witting farm teens. If that sounds like the makings of a gleefully tasteless farce, it might be because on a certain diabolical level Pornografia is one.

  But it is also a profound behavioral study, though Gombrowicz eschews the staid tactics of some literary traditions, whose human specimens writhe under pins of omniscience. Here the psychology—the observations, projections, paradoxes, negations—belong to the panting insatiability of “Gombrowicz” himself, as he negotiates sexual devastation, poisonous and ecstatic social maneuvering, moral collapse, political ambivalence, and a country manor murder. The manic oscillations of this voice escort us into the wonderful, horrible core of the novel, a whirl of masks, duplicity, flesh and fragmentation.

  It is a universe where an atheist must pray with true sincerity, deceiving even himself, to cover up the “immensity of his non-prayer,” where a girl’s hand is “naked with the nakedness not of a hand but of a knee emerging from under a dress,” and where all human endeavor might just be a “monkey making faces in a vacuum.”

  Outlandish metaphors, syntactical bolo punches, arias of exquisite paranoia, these are not adornments in Gombrowicz, they are the essence of his style. His word play is deep play. “In the end a battle arises between you and your work,” he wrote in his public diaries, “the same as that between a driver and the horses which are carrying him off. I cannot control the horses, but I must take care not to overturn the wagon on any of the sharp curves of the course.”

  Helping to keep the wagon upright here is Danuta Borchardt’s brilliant new translation, the first in English from the original Polish. Borchardt’s Pornografia honors both the wildness and the precision of Gombrowicz. She preserves his sudden and propulsive tense shifts and reveals a treasure of new cadences and swerves. Consider an older translation’s description of the pious Amelia’s sudden undoing in conversation with the novel’s chief instigator, Fryderyk: “She was dumfounded (sic) and disarmed …” Borchardt’s version is not only more vivid, but pivots on the weirdly compelling repetition of a word: “Knocked out of the game … she was like someone whose weapon had been knocked from her hand.” Better still is Borchardt’s Gombrowicz’s take on nightfall. The older translation details “… the sudden expansion of the holes and corners that fills the thick flux of night.” Fine, if a little vague, but it is no match for “… the intensification of nooks and crannies that the night’s sauce was filling.” The “night’s sauce” is almost more than we deserve.

  But it is never a matter of what we deserve. I certainly didn’t deserve the gift of Gombrowicz when a good friend gave me Ferdydurke many years ago. I was just a young jerk who thought he had a fix on the frontiers of literature. But that book and others revealed the raucous speed and sublime vaudeville the right kind of runaway wagon could deliver. All who enter may revel in the many-layered excitements of Pornografia, though the reader is advised to refrain from slapping easy rejoinders to the existential difficulties the novel raises. “The primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems,” said Gombrowicz in A Kind of Testament, a series of interviews with Dominique de Roux. And Gombrowicz did exactly that, through philosophy, satire, critique, all of it powered by a subtle and vicious comic prose that continues to offer dazzling views of our individual and collective derangements.

  “I am a humorist, a joker, an acrobat, a provocateur,” he once said. “My works turn double somersaults to please. I am a circus, lyricism, poetry, horror, riots, games—what more do you want?
”

  Let me know if you think of anything.

  Acknowledgments

  A translator does not work in a vacuum. I therefore want to share with the reader the names of those who with their works or in personal communications have informed my translations. You will find the list at the back of the book.

  This is the third of Gombrowicz’s novels, and most likely the last, that I have translated. Since there were omissions on my part in giving credit to those who are due, I would like to make amends. Beginning with John Felstiner and our translation group at Skidmore College in 1998, I want to go on expressing thanks to my friends Nona Porter and Alan and Barbara Braver whom I have buttonholed on many occasions. Professor Stanislaw Barańczak was the one who gave me the first impetus and encouragement to translate the first book—Ferdydurke. I had given Thom Lane previous credit, but this bears repeating. I want to thank him for his indefatigable assistance, as the native speaker of American English, in translating the three novels. His wide reading of literature and his keen intuition, since he knows no Polish, helped me to accurately express Gombrowicz’s ideas. I am also most grateful to Alex Littlefield, my book editor, for his sensitivity in approaching this difficult and idiosyncratic text. Last but not least, my thanks go to Eric Price, the C.O.O. and Associate Publisher of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., for accepting my translation for publication.

  Translator’s Note

  The first thing that strikes one about Witold Gombrowicz’s book is its title, so I will open with the author’s thoughts on its translation. In his conversation with Dominique de Roux in A Kind of Testament, Gombrowicz tells de Roux how he began writing the novel in Argentina: “… The year was 1955 … As usual, I began scribbling something on paper, with uncertainty, in ignorance, in terrible poverty that had visited all my beginnings. It slowly became rich, intense, and thus a new form emerged, a new work, a novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn’t such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.” Perhaps when he chose to call his new work “Pornography,” the word suggested something rare, hidden, a dark secret. I have left the title in Polish to convey shades of meaning the English may not have.

  Since Pornografia has already been translated into English, the question arises why do it again. The simple answer is that the previous translation was from a French translation and not directly from the original Polish text. There are bound to be mistakes in any translation, but Gombrowicz’s idiosyncratic and innovative use of language adds to the problem. Since the previous English translation was from an earlier translation into French, misunderstandings and errors were bound to multiply.

  Let me give you a couple of examples of how far the earlier two-step translation had wandered from the original Polish. One of the central characters, Fryderyk, writes a letter to his companion, the narrator, in which he reveals how his somewhat twisted psyche operates. It is clear, from the Polish, that Fryderyk says: “I walk the line of tensions, do you understand? I walk the line of excitements.” The earlier translation has this as “I follow the lines of force … The lines of desire.” The meaning is quite different and, according to one expert on Gombrowicz*, this has led to a major philosophical misinterpretation of Pornografia by Hanjo Berressem and subsequently to that by Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan. The reader may wish to investigate this issue.

  Another example is from the ending of the book, which reads as follows: “I looked at our little couple. They were smiling. As the young do when faced with the difficulty of extricating themselves from a predicament. And for a second, they and we, in our catastrophe, looked into each others’ eyes.” The previous English translation presents this passage as: “I looked at our couple. They smiled. As the young always do when they are trying to get out of a scrape. And for a split second, all four of us smiled.” The word “smiled” in the last sentence is incorrect, and the word “catastrophe” has been left out. The result is that Gombrowicz’s ending, which is bizarre and striking, has lost much of its impact.

  Here are a couple of examples of the way that Gombrowicz’s linguistic idiosyncrasy has been lost in this two-step translation. The two main characters, Witold and Fryderyk, are riding on a train and Witold observes about Fryderyk: “and he just was! … and he just was and was!” The previous translation opts for the prosaic statement “but he remained there!” Another example is a condensation typical of Gombrowicz, where we are told: “the point is HENIA WITH KAROL,” which the previous translation converts to a full sentence “in fact it is only about making: HENIA WITH KAROL.”

  A major piece of literature always has philosophical and psychological implications, and this is definitely true of Pornografia. To view it merely as entertainment or as a study on voyeurism would be a great mistake. There is no better way to convey this than by quoting the author himself, again from A Kind of Testament

  “… The hero of this novel, Fryderyk, is a Christopher Columbus, setting out to discover unknown lands. What is he searching? Actually it is this beauty and new poetry, concealed between the adult and the boy. He is a poet of great, extreme consciousness, this is how I wanted him to be in the novel. But how difficult it is to understand each other these days! Some critics saw Satan in him, more or less, while others—mostly Anglo-Saxons—were satisfied with a more trivial label, voyeur. My Fryderyk is neither Satan nor a voyeur, but rather he has within him something of a stage director, even a chemist, who by bringing people together tries to create the alcohol of a new charm.

  … [In this novel there is] a desperate fight of the adult wish for fulfillment with an easing-of-burden quality of youth that is light, reckless, irresponsible. A wish, that is the stronger the more it hits something that does not offer resistance. In the finale, the seventeen-year-old lightness deprives the criminals, the sins, of their importance, the novel ends in non-fulfillment.”

  Because of the novel’s many levels of complexity, it is clearly important to convey the original with both clarity and faithfulness. A seamless translation would be wonderful, but it has been a challenge to achieve this while still leaving Gombrowicz’s stylistic voice unscathed. It is my hope that my effort will lead to a greater appreciation and enjoyment of the novel.

  —D.B.

  PORNOGRAFIA

  Information

  Pornografia takes place in the Poland of the war years. Why? Partly because the atmosphere of war is most appropriate for it. Partly because it is very Polish—and perhaps it was initially conceived on the model of a cheap novel in the manner of Rodziewiczówna or Zarzycka (did this similarity disappear in its subsequent adaptation?). And partly just to be contrary—to suggest to the nation that its womb can accommodate conflicts, dramas, ideas other than those already theoretically established.

  I do not know the wartime Poland. I did not witness it. After 1939 I never visited Poland. I wrote this as I imagined it. So it is an imaginary Poland—and don’t worry that what I have written is sometimes crazy, sometimes perhaps fantastic, that is not its point and is of no significance at all to matters happening here.

  One more thing. Let no one look for critical or ironic intent in the theme pertaining to the Underground Army (UA, in the second part). I want to assure the UA of my respect. I invented the situation—it could happen in any underground organization—because this is what was required by its composition and its spirit, somewhat melodramatic here. UA or no UA, people are people—it could happen anywhere when a leader is stricken with cowardice or when a murder is impelled by an underground resistance movement.

  —W.G.

  Part I

  I

  I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafés—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, the Ipsu—would gather i
n an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers … picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art. … Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.

  He scrupulously thanked us for the glass of vodka we offered him—and no less scrupulously he said: “I would also like to ask you for a match …” Whereupon he waited for the match, and he waited … and, when given it, he proceeded to light his cigarette. In the meantime the discussion raged—God, proletariat, nation, art—while the stench was peeking into our nostrils. Someone asked: “Fryderyk, sir, what winds have blown you here?”—to which he instantly gave an exhaustive reply: “I learned from Madame Ewa that Piętak frequently comes here, therefore I dropped in, since I have four rabbit pelts and the sole of a shoe.” And, to show that these were not empty words, he displayed the pelts, which had been wrapped in paper.