Seconding Gombrowicz: A Translator's Introduction to Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr's Ferdydurke

Witold Gombrowicz's first novel Ferdydurke, originally published in Warsaw in 1937, remains one of his most effective acts of literary provocation, in a career devoted to calculated impetuousness and profound insouciance. That the mind of a playwright was also at work in the novel is clear in its first passages, which freely jump between narrative prose and the dialogue of a play script. But Gombrowicz's histrionic and dramatic sensibility permeates Ferdydurke in more profound ways, as well. The motif that provides the inner logic to the novel's fragmented and collage-like structure is that of the duel. Just as the characters challenge and provoke each other in ways both startling and revealing, the novel itself is designed to have the same effect on the reader. Like an impudent suitor, Gombrowicz demands attention, at times out of ardor and others out of mockery. To keep things interesting, he does not make it easy to judge his motives on this score.

To respond to Gombrowicz's attentions, whether to reject or to join him, is but the beginning of the game. To join forces with him is immediately to seek another quarry for either seduction or mockery—an object that can extend to society at large. Gombrowicz's duels, however, are not dualistic in nature. Their objective is in fact to release both parties from a polarized relationship by pushing it to an inevitable extreme, and literally or figuratively to change or die in the process. Linked to the polarity of a duel, however, is a second motif of entropy, of a breaking down of existing structures, as creative rebellion, and ultimately as a means to more meaningful action and expression. Of course misdirected entropy can also be destructive, leading to a grave rather than a new beginning—so the stakes of Gombrowicz's theatrical and existential gambits are not petty ones. Like Nietzsche before him, Gombrowicz's ultimate objective was a more creative life for both the individual and the collective. The collective part of this equation always led him to the theatre and to questions of the innate theatricality of off-stage life.

To adapt Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke for the stage is to become one of the playwright's seconds in a duel with the world that began in Poland 1937. The novel began and remains his manifesto as a writer, an invitation to join what he himself dubbed the "Ferdydurkists." The duel that the novel seeks to provoke both reflects a given time and culture (interwar Poland) and a more archetypal set of themes that have carried the work in both novelistic and theatrical forms across the barriers of time and culture.

Gombrowicz's gift for provocation and theatrical temperament, however, are inseparable from his talent and originality as a writer, as a master and innovator in the expressive use of the Polish language. His undiminished appeal and influence in Poland is in equal parts due to the spirit of his work and the extraordinary language in which he wrote. His contribution to the literary evolution of Polish in the twentieth century was no less profound than the country's celebrated poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, or Adam Zagajewski. The wittiness of Gombrowicz's language is among his most important attributes, which could be compared to that of Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton in English. Gombrowicz's language in Ferdydurke looks both forward and backward, on the one hand generating neologisms and on the other mischievously mixing erudite literary allusions, quotations, and parody with schoolyard slang. One particular challenge to the translation of Gombrowicz into English is the fact that his linguistic play is often structural, involving gender, diminutives, and case constructions that have no counterpart in English grammar. That he was also a playwright makes his contribution distinct on another...