trans-atlantyk (witold gombrowicz, tr carolyn french & nina karsov)

This is one of the stranger books you will ever read. The story as such of the writer’s journey from the Baltic port of Gdynia to Buenos Aires at the outbreak of the Second World War. The writer, struggling to survive, falls in with a bunch of aristocratic, febrile emigrés. He gets caught up in a psychodrama involving a count and his son, who is being seduced by a wealthy Argentine, Gonzalo. There’s a fake duel and a potentially murderous denouement, when a whole host of Poles arrive and sing and dance a traditional Krakow song, even as the country itself is tottering to defeat at the hands of the invading Germans. This denouement, which by happenstance I read this morning in Krakow, is reminiscent of the final scene of Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds. War and defeat haunt this short novel which at the same time seems to be doing everything in its power to escape this haunting. The language is jaunty and mannered, even Joyceian. The tone is ribald, comic, scathing. The author’s intentions feel hard to decipher. Perhaps, in the face of absolute despair, the only option left is a demented hilarity. 

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This note from the introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak is of interest: “During most of the war years he was…struggling for survival, coping with extreme poverty and wasting his energies on a job as a bank clerk offered to him by a Polish banker in Buenos Aires. According to Gombrowicz he wrote Trans-Atlantyk on his desk at the bank, hiding the manuscript in a drawer whenever his superior entered the room.”