Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, a reading guide for non-Polish readers

Abstract

Witold Gombrowicz arrived to Buenos Aires on board of the Chrobry on august 22nd 1939. Some days later Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Gombrowicz decided to stay in Argentina, were he was to remain almost 24 years. In 1947, after almost 10 years hardly writing anything, he decides to explain his atypical arrival to the country and the weeks that followed. But that Trans-Atlantyk quickly took a new destination and brought the author back to his mother land, as it turned to a complex allegory on the relationship between individuals and the nation. To make it all more difficult, Gombrowicz chose a literary expression style coming from Sarmatian noblemen’s memories’ books from the 17^th century. Although the plot of the novel is set in Argentina, the main theme will be utterly Poland. All those aspects makes the novel difficult to translate to foreign languages and almost impossible to understand in a proper way to non-polish readers. In our paper we’ll try and give some keys to make this book more easily understandable to foreign readers, so that they can reach the metaphorical level of this polish major work. After that, we’ll concentrate in some translation approaches used in different translations and the forewords incorporated to guide non-polish readers through this Polish national anti-epopee. In the last chapter we’ll consider Trans-Atlantyk in the light of Milan Kundera’s ideas on the destiny of great artists coming from small nations exposed in his essay Les testaments trahis.  We’ll finish with some considerations on the place achieved by Gombrowicz in Polish and Argentinean national literatures and amongst the best world authors.