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贡布罗维奇的《费迪杜克》的书评

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发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览
只是介绍, 不全

FERDYDURKE (BOOK REVIEW)  




Fiction

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, TRANS. FROM THE POLISH BY DANUTA BORCHARDT; FOREWORD BY SUSAN SONTAG. Yale Univ., $30 (281p) ISBN 0-300-08239-8; paper $14.95-08240-1

This masterpiece of European modernism was first published in 1937, and so arrived on the literary scene at an inopportune moment. First the Second World War, then Russian domination of Gombrowicz\'s Poland and the author\'s decades of exile in Argentina all but expunged public awareness of a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity, cultural and political mores, and eros. Joey Kowalski narrates the story of his transformation from a 30-year-old man into a teenage boy. Joey awakens one morning gripped by fear when he perceives a ghost of himself standing in the corner of his room. He orders the ghost, whose face "was all someone else\'s--and yet it was I," to leave. When the ghost is gone, Kowalski is driven to write, to create his own "oeuvre," to be "free to expound [his] own views." A visitor arrives, a doctor of philosophy named Pimko. As Pimko talks to him, Kowalski begins to shrink, to become "a little persona"; his oeuvre becomes a "little oeuvre." Pimko, in turn, grows larger and larger. He takes Kowalski to an old-fashioned Polish school, and then the man-boy\'s adventures adventures continue in a middle-class household and on the country estate of landed aristocrats. Kowalski\'s exploits are comic and erotic (for this is a modernism closer to dada and the Marx brothers than to the elevated tones of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound), but also carry a shrewdly subtle groundswell of philosophical seriousness. Gombrowicz is interested in identity and the way time and circumstance, history and place impose form on people\'s lives. Unsentimental, mocking and sometimes brutal, Kowalski\'s youthfulness is callow and immature, but it is also free to revel in desire. Susan Sontag ushers this new translation into print with a strong and useful foreword, calling Gombrowicz\'s tale "extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny... wonderful." And it is.(Oct.)


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Copyright of Publishers Weekly is the property of Reed Business Information and its content may not be copied or e-mailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder`s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or e-mail articles for individual use.
Source: Publishers Weekly, 09/18/2000, Vol. 247 Issue 38, p90, 1p
Item: 3585961

  FERDYDURKE (BOOK)  




Trans. Danuta Borchardt. Foreword Susan Sontag. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 281 pp. Paper: $14.95. Witold Gombrowicz.

This new edition of Ferdydurke marks the first Polish-to-English translation of Gombrowicz\'s novel, originally published in 1937, and the important return of a long out-of-print modernist classic. In Ferdydurke Joey Kowalski writes Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity. His friends warn him not to publish a book identifying closely with immaturity: who will ever think of him as mature? Joey\'s aunts--one part family, one part Greek chorus filled with portent, one part cultural nags--beseech him to behave like an adult, with an adult\'s occupation, or at least an adult\'s hobby. Joey ignores them. A professor comes to visit him, reads his manuscript, and decides that Joey needs an education. The thirty-year-old writer, much like a Kafka protagonist, is abducted from his adult world. He becomes a schoolboy, attending classes, committing turgid Polish verse to memory, conjugating Latin verbs, and battling classmates on the playground. Ferdydurke is frequently read as a rousing defense of youthful naivete and foolishness against the staid values of prewar Polish high culture. High culture does come in for a drubbing, as when a student asks a teacher why he should admire a certain poet and the teacher can manage only circular reasoning: "Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it." Ferdydurke is actually the rare sort of satire in which the ground is always shifting. Gombrowicz identifies with neither high nor low culture. If maturity for him is stapled together with empty homilies, immaturity is a selfish fantasy. Gombrowicz gleefully runs through all the handy props: parochial nationalism, permissive modern parenting, adults\' longing after youth, the nobility\'s romantic view of peasants, the peasants\' indulgence of that romanticism, and the belief that what is new must be modern and therefore the best. Nothing was safe from Gombrowicz, and still nothing is safe from him.

~~~~~~~~

By Paul Maliszewski
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发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者
http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/082398.htm

曾兄是从昆德拉那里知道这书的?

这书图书馆有, 大不了我找时间把序翻译出来.
但我向来不喜欢桑塔格.


[此贴子已经被作者于2004-2-25 13:03:34编辑过]
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发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者
刚才我一开始查的时候拼错了他的名字, 这里又找回评论.


Too Polish for the Poles
By John Bayley
Trans-Atlantyk
by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Carolyn French, translated by Nina Karsov
Yale University Press, 122 pp., $20.00

One sometimes wonders nowadays if literature in English is not beginning to split up into component parts: English English novels, American English ones, Indian English, Caribbean, Californian, and so forth. Then along comes a novel like Vikram Seth\'s A Suitable Boy, which seems to appeal almost equally to the readers of the various "Englishes," and for the same sort of reasons. None the less, the fissiparous tendencies in modern English writing continue unchecked (do contemporary English and American novelists really have any idea of what the others are writing about?) and these tendencies are further complicated by other and more eccentric kinds of linguistic separatism. The new and in many ways admirable translation, into quite a new sort of English, of Witold Gombrowicz\'s fantasy novel Trans-Atlantyk shows us something of the fine detail of such recent fragmentation.

Although the name of Gombrowicz is known to an English-speaking readership, principally through translations of his now classic novel Ferdydurke, which appeared in Poland in 1937, this shorter and later fantasy has never made it into English before, although many good judges among Gombrowicz\'s fellow countrymen consider it his master work. The novel was begun in Argentina in 1948 and was published in Paris by a Polish émigré press in 1953. The Polish political thaw of 1957 made publication in its native country possible, along with reprints of Gombrowicz\'s earlier work, and it became a modern Polish classic, even though, for reasons we shall see in a moment, its circulation remained limited to intellectuals, students, and fellow-writers.


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What was Gombrowicz doing inArgentina in the first place? Good question. As if all Polish writers had to undergo the testing and classic Polish experience, he was re-enacting the sudden fate of Lord Jim, the archetypal creation of Gombrowicz\'s great fellow-countryman, Joseph Conrad. Jim of course abandoned a sinking vessel, an experience that altered his whole life and being. Conrad wrote, at first with great difficulty, in an English which is now wonderfully accessible to us all. Gombrowicz was not having any of that. A Pole from the same gentry class, whose relatives were old-fashioned landowners like Conrad\'s, he wrote Trans-Atlantyk in a seventeenth-century idiom which most of his contemporary Poles could barely understand. At the time he was working in Argentina as a bank clerk in a bank run by another Polish émigré.

He had arrived in Buenos Aires in some style on the new Polish ocean liner Boleslaw Chrobry. After the runaway success of Ferdydurke, in 1939 he was a celebrity, and the owners of the Chrobry had given him and another Polish writer free passage to show the flag among the sizable Polish community in Argentina. It was a holiday for them. But they had scarcely arrived before Hitler invaded Poland and the war began. What to do? The Chrobry was ordered to return to Europe, to a port in England or Scotland. Gombrowicz\'s friend and fellow-writer went on board; so did Gombrowicz. The ropes were already cast off when he came running down the gangplank with a suitcase in each hand. Like Lord Jim, he jumped.

It was the kind of move whose motives are too complex to explain, the moment to which Conrad in his books returned again and again. Solitude or Poland? Gombrowicz the philosopher and intellectual chose solitude, since he could not have Poland. Indeed perhaps like everything else in the history of the Polish psyche, it was not a choice. It was the famous "existential moment." But more rationally, he probably could not face the dilution of living for the rest of the war, or it could have been indefinitely, in an Anglo-Saxon and European society. Very likely he feared precisely the fate which had befallen Conrad, and which Conrad had embraced with such success. Gombrowicz, as he was to write in A Kind of Testament, preferred, in what might be called an even more traditional Polish fashion, a fate that might have appeared totally and perversely irresponsible.

He attempted, in fact, to do something splendidly Polish, against any rational grain. He would try to create an international success, a world reputation, by doing exactly the opposite of what was done, for example, by the Jewish Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, or in our own time by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. They became, in their own fashion, world-famous by traveling with the current, by adopting the lingua franca of English and using it in their own way and for their own purposes. They joined, as it were, a linguistic mother hive. That is what I meant by suggesting that English as a common literary language is now becoming increasingly fragmented, so that books like Trans-Atlantyk, which might once have remained in the obscurity of an idiom and a language made deliberately by its author as untranslatable as possible, are now nonetheless, and in the teeth of the nature of their original achievement, becoming known in translation.


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But in translation the book makes things almost as difficult for itself as did the original. Highly scholarly as well as determinedly honest, the translators admit that they failed in one sense before they began. They could not produce "a conventional translation."

The aim of literary translation is to make a foreign language work into one of our own…Trans-Atlantyk is simply too Polish to be Englished, at least for the general reader. Moreover, to impose any literary form on this piece would have been contrary to the central tenet of Gombrowicz\'s aesthetic.
That tenet is quite simple: a literary work is its own language, hence unique. No real compromise is possible. Gombrowicz seems to have deeply disliked James Joyce\'s writings, but he shared the paradoxical tenet of Joycean modernism: that a writer must achieve universal recognition by writing in a language so uncompromisingly his own that no one else can understand it. Joyce required from his readers "the study of a lifetime." Gombrowicz would have scorned such ludicrous pretension, however tongue in cheek Joyce\'s claim may have been. His perversity goes much deeper, deeper even than the despair his translators must have felt when they acknowledged the book as too Polish to be Englished, "at least for the general reader."

For Trans-Atlantyk was, and was intended to be, too Polish for the Poles as well. In jumping ship, like Lord Jim, Gombrowicz abandoned not only his country but its present-day language as well, so that he had now to make up his own. The novel for which he was already well known, Ferdydurke, a word that, as the author pointed out, means nothing whatever in any language, had nonetheless been linguistically a conventional display of Polish high spirits, recognized as such by his fellow-countrymen, compared to the total oddity he was producing in Trans-Atlantyk.

This was what he recognized in A Kind of Testament.

Trans-Atlantyk was such folly, from every point of view! To think that I wrote something like that, just when I was isolated on the American continent, without a penny, deserted by God and men! In my position it was important to write something quickly which could be translated and published in foreign languages. Or, if I wanted to write something for Poles, something which didn\'t injure their national pride. And I dared—the very height of irresponsibility!—to fabricate a novel which was inaccessible to foreigners because of its linguistic difficulties and which was a deliberate provocation of the Polish émigrés, the only readership on which I could rely!
No wonder the translators declare the book "contained something to offend everyone." "Many a Polish admirer of Gombrowicz today confesses not to have read it." (This is not quite the same as saying that many an admirer of James Joyce has not read Finnegans Wake: virtually all the Irishman\'s admirers have read in it and around it, and, most sedulously, about it.)


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So what sort of thing is this impossible book? The answer has to be that the "general reader," or even the specialized reader, has still no way of finding out. Even the various disintegrated "Englishes" of our time, or the historic idioms of Urquhart and Aubrey, of Sterne or the more obscure Elizabethan dramatists, are quite unequal to conveying what must be its genius and its original flavor. The translators struggle bravely, but, as far as this reader is concerned, almost wholly in vain. Sounding sometimes vaguely like the contemporary novels of Barth or Burgess, sometimes like a translation of Günter Grass, or Tristram Shandy rendered (if such a thing were possible) in an inferior and imitative idiom, the English of Trans-Atlantyk is simply not tolerable, as English or as anything else. South American Spanish speakers, who might recognize some kind of travesty of their own tongue in this English, and no doubt in the original Polish too, were no doubt as affronted by Gombrowicz\'s linguistic caper as were the Polish émigrés of Buenos Aires. Suicidally if magnificently the translators seek and fail to find some mid-Atlantic version of the author\'s true native cussedness, mainly toward his fellow Poles. There are superb translations of the diaries Gombrowicz wrote in Argentina,
  • of Ferdydurke itself, and more particularly of other Polish writers and contemporaries like Bruno Schulz. It is not Polish that is the problem, but the language in which Gombrowicz chose to write Trans-Atlantyk.

    And yet so odd can be the contemporary appetite for disintegrative English that aficionados of this odd work, in its English version, may well soon be coming out of the woodwork and beginning a cult. If so, the brave attempt at translation we have here will not have been entirely a failure. For it cannot be denied that the translators have achieved an idiom of some sort, in which picaresque event and non-event—duels, quarrels, comic confrontations, and outpourings, some of them involving lustful Argentinians and the self-important members of the Polish community in Argentina—can flow along, jerkily but unstoppably.

    In what follows, one of the more consecutive accounts in the book, the narrator is accosted in the street by one Puto:

    Yet, since we were going along the street together, he began to tell me His:
    Whereupon in a whisper he tells me his all, and I Listen. Viz. that man, perchance Mestizo, Portuguese, of a Persian-Turkish mother in Libya born, was called Gonzalo; and very Rich; about eleven or twelve in the morning from his bed gets up, drinks coffee, and then walks out into a street and there along it goes and after Youths or Lads. When he has singled out one, anon comes up to him, asks the way; and having thus begun with him starts to chat about this and that just to gather if that Boy can be persuaded into sin for five, ten, or even fifteen Pesos. But most often in Fear, in Terror he dared not speak of it, and they shunned him, whereupon he would away as if Stepped on. So then after another Boy, Youth, or even Lad who caught his eye…and there, if you please, again about the way asking, talking, and again about some Games or Dances chatting and all to tempt one for fifteen or twenty pesos; yet that Boy might say a sharp word to him or spit. Then he flees, but in Heat. Now after another Brunet or a Blond, accosting, inquiring. Then when he tires, he comes back to his home to rest and there on the Sopha having rested a bit, again onto a street to look for, walk, approach, ask now a Craftsman, now a Labourer or an Apprentice, or a Scullery Lad or a Soldier, or a Sailor. Most often though in Horror, Fear, whenever forth he steps, Back he steps straight; or else, if you please, he goes after one and that one has gone into a Shop or from sight has sunk away and naught on\'t. Again then to his home, tired, fatigued, but Afire, comes back and having supped and rested on the Sopha, again into a street dashes, a Boy, if only well-shaped, to single out, talk into\'t. If then he came by such a one and has settled on terms for ten, fifteen, or twenty Pesos, straightway to his lodging leads him; and there, having locked the door with a key, he his jacket, tie, trousers doffs, drops on the Floor, undresses down to his Shirt and the light dims, Perfume sprays. And here the Lad him in the jaw and to the Wardrobe to seize his linen or snatch his Cashes! Numb from terrible fear Puto dares not cry out, allows him to take all and suffers his painful blows. From those Blows, Cuffs, his Heat even stronger!So after the Lad has left, he again into the street, blazing, Flaming, enraptured and likewise Terrified, Anguished, and on after Apprentices, young Craftsmen, Soldiers or Sailors; but whenever forth he steps, Back he steps for, although the lust great, the Fear greater than the lust. But now the night is late and streets are more and more empty; then to his home comes Puto back, down to his Shirt undresses, his tired bones in bed, lonely, comforts, so that tomorrow would Get up, drink coffee, and after Young boys chase—again. And the next day again he gets up, trousers, jacket dons, and after Young boys chases again. An the next day, having got up from his Bed, again into a street so as after Boys to chase.
    Whereupon Isay:"Is\'t possible, you miserable man, that a Craftsman or an Apprentice or a Soldier can yield to your temptation if only Digust, Abomination you can rouse in him by your charms?" No sooner had I said this does he cry and seemingly sore wounded: "You are mistaken \'cause Eyes large and Fiery I have, and a white hand, and a Delicate foot!"

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    At least Trans-Atlantyk is short: if it were as long as Finnegans Wake no one could have translated it, and no one would probably have read it in the original either. Shakespeare embarrassed Tolstoy because of what the great Russian felt to be his unsuccessful jokes; and what is one to make of humor which consists in English of torturing the syntax ("I knew that despite the late hour I could realize my intent since Tomasz with his Son two small chambers in a Pension occupied") as if some ponderous Edwardian wit like Jerome K. Jerome was seeking to replicate the nature of German grammar? It would be pointless, and indeed rather painful, to quote any more of the novella at length; but, as one should repeat, readers who like this sort of thing could well become hooked on the brave and rather endearing equivalent that the translators have worked out; and they may find that the scatterbrained tale has both charm and wisdom lurking inside its oddity.

    If they do so they will certainly be enjoying something unique, a vivid and what might be termed a wholly authentic anachronism. For Trans-Atlantyk is based on the generic principles of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century country squire\'s or nobleman\'s oral tale, known to Polish literary tradition as the gaweda. Its point is its gaiety and its absurdity, not in the conscientious thoroughgoing sense of the Germans\' Baron Munchausen and his tales, but rather the heroic frivolity of Adam Mickiewicz\'s epic Pan Tadeusz, which has been called "the Bible of Polishness." Pan Tadeusz is really an inspired and rhymed gaweda about the patriarchal life of a Lithuanian forest manor on the eve of Napoleon\'s Russian campaign, an adventure which made Polish hearts soar with the hope of freedom and independence.

    Gombrowicz\'s own independence was, naturally enough, of a very different sort, the independence of a man who "jumped," and left Polishness behind him. But, like Joyce, Gombrowicz had always in a sense possessed the temperament of the exile, which paradoxically feeds and depends on its own idea of its homeland, as Joyce devoted his creating genius to a Dublin he had quitted. Both writers mercilessly mocked the images of "Irishness" and "olishness" beloved by their fellow-countrymen, and Gombrowicz remarked in one of his prefaces to Ferdydurke that no one on earth was or had ever been more stupid than the type of the traditional Polish gentry. Nor was that type essentially altered when it became the bright, modern, forward-looking Mr. and Mrs. Youthful of Ferdydurke, the up-to-date young couple rejoicing in their new twentieth-century Polish identity, and representing to the intellectual Gombrowicz all that was most absurd about modern bourgeois living.

    Yet there is nothing in the slightest degree satirical about either Ferdydurke or Trans-Atlantyk, and none of that conceited intellectual\'s pedantry never absent from Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom the Polish writer was always to be in a relation of comradely hostility. Sartre was simply not human enough for the Pole, and for his sense not so much of the absurd as of what in the phenomenon of human life could never be anything else than funny. As a philosopher Gombrowicz has of course his own system, in some respects akin to the Sartrean one, which in spite of the irreverence of his novels is taken very seriously in his own country—a selection of his essays published there is called Gombrowicz the Philosopher. But in a curious way even the leading feature of his system, that of the distinction between what he called "Form" and "Chaos," turns out to have something hilarious about it rather than portentous. This is natural enough, for the distinction underlies the confused and hilarious world in which his fiction has its being.


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    As Stanislaw Baranczak puts the matter in an admirable introduction to Trans-Atlantyk, "by virtue of being human each of us is doomed to be part of the \'interhuman church,"\' the ritualized and institutionalized relationships that bind the individual to "others." The individual me is Chaos. We are Chaos and yet we can only live by form; and for the writer, as Baranczak says, "the same Form that enables the individual psyche to express itself is also the psyche\'s chief obstacle to expressing itself." By "jumping" like Lord Jim, or like Gombrowicz when he ran back down the gangway of the Chrobry in Buenos Aires, we return to Chaos. (The first week of his Diary after the jump simply runs Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. And so forth.)

    Rather, as in Dostoevsky\'s novels, the many variations between Form and Chaos which Trans-Atlantyk plays upon amount to a polyphony or rather a cacophony of voices and farces. But Gombrowicz is as distant from Dostoevsky as any Polish intellectual is from his Russian equivalent. The Voice—manifested as many voices—is paramount in both; but Dostoevsky\'s dark and spiteful humor finds no echo in the laughter of the Polish narrator, although neither writer\'s narrator is himself using his "own" voice and laugh, but is instead a multiple quotient of personae variously described in the text as "I," or "Gombrowicz." The Anglo-French-Polish Conrad uses the same sort of method, in a more elementary fashion, with his own narrator-self, the English sea officer Marlowe. And simple though the device is with Conrad, it seems to me possible that both writers are using what in Poland used to be called the "Sarmatian model"—the parochial oral "gentry tale," as opposed to the sophisticated and Westernized literature current in court circles. Such tales were recited, hardly ever printed, and constitute a form of literature which has virtually died out in the West, and is perhaps vanishing from the world in general.

    Paradoxically the "gentry tale" was not really a "folk-tale," but rather tales inspired and fashioned by the gentry and then recited in patriarchal fashion to all classes. Both Conrad and Gombrowicz were gentlemen to the core (Conrad always claimed he had shown English sailors that "a gentleman from the Ukraine" could know their business as well as they did), and in Gombrowicz\'s case the pervasiveness of a traditional gentry attitude in Ferdydurke and in Trans-Atlantyk is probably more significant than Western readers realize. It gives his books their peculiar and now rare quality of a total and easy intimacy and familiarity, as if "we"—at least we honorary fellow-gentry—were all naturally conversant with what was going on. As Baranczak puts it,

    the fact that the listeners were, as a rule, well-disposed friends, neighbors and family members representing the same social class, educational background, and cultural taste resulted in the characteristically shorthandlike quality of the narrative, which could easily do without laborious introductions, aside explanations, and detailed references, since the audience knew all there was to know anyway.
    Transposed into modern terms, Baranczak\'s explanation of the original genre means something like a cult book, which the members instinctively understand and see the point of. This is what Ferdydurke, and more especially Trans-Atlantyk, really are. The joke at the beginning of another cult book, The Catcher in the Rye, is that this sixteen-year-old New Yorker should be telling us that he is not going to write it up like David Copperfield and all that crap. The joke at the beginning of Trans-Atlantyk is that a modern Polish writer who has just hopped off a transatlantic liner in Argentina should be telling us about it in the gaweda style of the baroque period Polish gentry.


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    A living and lively cult book can have a powerfully destructive effect on the dead matter of a vast system—in this case Polish Marxism. Indeed that may be its true and principal literary purpose, even if it is one that is necessarily temporary and transitory. And the destructive virtues of a cult can be salutary in a national setting as well as an ideological one: many works like Gombrowicz\'s can have, paradoxically, the effect of what he called "wresting the Pole from Poland, so that he may become just a human being"—a being for whom nationhood is, and should be, as much of a joke as Marxist dogma. Baranczak recalls an exam on Marxism he and his comrades had to take at the university of Poznan, and how they spent the night before it laughing uproariously over a tattered copy of Trans-Atlantyk, which Baranczak had produced after quoting to them his favorite line: "I am not so mad as to have any views These Days, or not to have them." Quite so. The novelist Robert Musil, from across the border in Austria, would have agreed with that one. There is nothing that sharpens the mind like intelligent irreverence; and none of the students had any trouble passing the exam in the morning without having done any work for it other than reading Gombrowicz.

    Notes
  • Diary, three volumes, translated by Lillian Valee, edited by Jan Kott (Northwestern University Press, 1988, 1989, 1993). The paperback edition was recently reissued as a boxed set.
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    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者
    Something Childish
    By John Bayley
    Diary, Volume 1
    by Witold Gombrowicz, edited by Jan Kott, translated by Lillian Vallee
    Northwestern University Press, 232 pp., $12.95 (paper)

    Every so often one runs across a sort of fugitive from the literary world, a volume that seems to be forever on the run, flitting across frontiers, denied a residence permit, only one jump ahead of the immigration authorities and the secret police. There is often an element of playing hard to get about such books, which makes them still more of a legend and increases the potential reader\'s curiosity.

    Ferdydurke is a prime example. In an interview in the New Left Review Sartre once observed that the "naive" novel "is now quite impossible," and went on to say that the analytic novel of the future had been invented by Gombrowicz, whose books were also designed "to self-destruct." Yes, but who is this Gombrowicz? Intellectuals would know, perhaps; the common reader, although by now quite familiar with Sartre or Beckett, might still be baffled. Now that Ferdydurke is a Penguin paperback, beautifully introduced by the poet and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, all becomes clear.


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    Gombrowicz was a Polish gentleman, child of an old landowning family. (The word "child" is highly important in his context, as we shall soon find out.) He did not fit into such a heritage. Joining the Warsaw intelligentsia he began to write: unprinted essays, stories, and a play, Princess Ivona, written in 1934 and currently on tour in England, where it seems familiar to audiences accustomed to Beckett and Ionesco. He attracted no special attention until 1937, when Ferdydurke was published. Gombrowicz was then thirty-three. His book created a sensation in Polish intellectual circles, where an international future was predicted for this scandalous work. Then in 1939 came the German invasion. Polish discussion disappeared. It is worth remembering that throughout the war Sartre, whose novel La Nausée appeared just before it, continued to write and to talk in Paris. Gombrowicz was in exile in Argentina, where Ferdydurke was published in Spanish in 1947. Its author noted in his diary that "Ferdydurke had been drowned in the sleep-walking immobility of South America."

    Gombrowicz had in fact reached Buenos Aires before the Polish apocalypse, whether out of prescience or for some random reason is not now apparent. In his introduction to Volume One of the diary Wojciech Karpinski tells the story, admittedly legendary, of Gombrowicz taking passage for home on a Polish vessel just before war broke out, and an instant before the final whistle blew running back down the gangway with his two suitcases. What had called to him from South America? Something to do with emptiness, with the lack of meaning, with youth, or rather the idea of youth; perpetually unfulfilled in maturity? There is a suggestion that he never intended to stay in Buenos Aires, but had merely taken the opportunity offered by his acquaintance Stempowski, director of the Gdynia-America line, to make the inaugural voyage in his role as a Polish intellectual, landowner, minor celebrity. In that case his decision to "jump," to maroon himself on another continent, seems comparable to that involuntary step taken by Lord Jim, the great creation of an earlier Polish writer.

    Conrad settled in England: Gombrowicz abandoned himself to isolation like another of Conrad\'s characters, Martin Decoud in Nostromo. Decoud, the arch-intellectual, involving himself in a hazardous political adventure, cannot stand for more than a few hours the loneliness of an uninhabited island. Grasping that he has no existence outside the pages of a book, conversations, theories, the endless chatter of the bookish cafés, he shoots himself, or rather allows himself to be shot by himself. Gombrowicz was clearly very different, although in the contrast itself there is a kind of relationship. He once remarked, "I am not Gombrowicz the writer. I am just Gombrowicz, and not even that." He did not depend upon intellectuals and yet he was obsessed with them, obsessed with escaping from them and becoming a sort of intellectuality of one. He is the anti-intellectuals\' intellectual.

    Sartre, in writing La Nausée, was setting out his ideas, finding an embodiment for his concept of the existential. Gombrowicz, as he tells us in an afterword to the novel, began Ferdydurke as a satire against the whole august European tradition of thought systems.

    How could I, a Pole, believe in theories? That would be grotesque. Against the Polish sky, against the sky of a paling, waning Europe, one can see why so much paper coming from the West falls to the ground, into the mud, onto the sand, so that little boys grazing their cows can make the usual use of it. But these theories, which drift across the sky, become ridiculous, blind, ignoble, bloody, vain. Gentle ideas are pregnant with mountains of corpses. What can one do? Everyone sees the world from where he stands. It is not for nothing that I come from the plains which separate Europe from the rest of the world.
    Or that separate Argentina from Europe. Perhaps Gombrowicz found his own Poland in South America? Observing (a point on which Conrad was silently very sensitive) that "it is not right that a Pole should have to sacrifice all his humanity to Poland," Gombrowicz goes on to say that large countries do not lay such burdens on the writer. But in minor countries, like Poland, Argentina, Norway, and so forth, "it is really a matter of life and death to break away, to keep one\'s distance." It is a familiar argument, but Argentina may have offered Gombrowicz the chance to embrace his Polish plains by other means. For this child of squires there were more ways than one of remaining with the landed gentry. And in Ferdydurke (a meaningless nonsense word, by the way, unsuited to any known language) the whole question of who makes you, and how you make yourself, becomes a wild, prolonged, and lonely joke.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Conrad\'s Martin Decoud, in his few hours on the barren island, would certainly have recognized the truth of this note from Gombrowicz\'s diary, a truth promulgated in its entries over a quarter of a century or so, the truth about how the diarist spent a Sunday in Buenos Aires.

    Tragedy.
    I walked in the rain, hat perched over my forehead, collar raised, hands in my pockets.
    After which I returned home.
    Then I went out again to get something to eat.
    Then I ate it.
    The most "authentic" thing about Gombrowicz, in existentialist jargon, is that he seems to be a natural, a "naive" writer, who discovered existentialism by mistake. His fellow countryman and intense admirer, Bruno Schulz, said in a lecture on Gombrowicz that "he did not follow the smooth path of intellectual speculation, but the path of pathology, of his own pathology." Schulz, himself a brilliant imaginative writer, one of a constellation in Polish literature before the war, understood the wholly unabstract nature of Gombrowicz\'s talent. The Street of Crocodiles, Schulz\'s own enchanting fantasy on petit-bourgeois Jewish life in provincial Poland, is quite a different matter, intensely stylish in the way that Kafka is stylish, and in some degree inspired by Kafka\'s own fantasies. Schulz, who was gunned down in his native city by the German SS during the occupation, has the kind of style that comes over in translation, and—again like Kafka\'s—adapts admirably to style in a different tongue. Alas, one has the impression that the reverse is true with Gombrowicz. His translators have done their best, but in English he sounds awkward, colorless. The reader has a baffling sense that he must sound wonderful, sure, and strongly flavored in his native Polish, but that does not come over. Much else, fortunately, does.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    This is only the first volume of Gombrowicz diaries, but it reads more like a selection than extracts from a more comprehensive diary, which he kept over the years in Argentina. Gombrowicz spends some time reconsidering his past writings in the light of later trends and contemporary fashions.

    In 1956 Gombrowicz noted with his usual openness in his diary that existentialism and Marxism were two "bankruptcies" in which he had found himself unwittingly involved:

    I wrote Ferdydurke in the years 1936–37, when no one knew anything about this philosophy. In spite of this, Ferdydurke is existential to the marrow…. In this book, practically all the basic themes of existentialism play fortissimo: becoming, creating oneself, freedom, fear, absurdity, nothingness…with the single difference that in addition to the typical existential "spheres" of human life, like Heidegger\'s banal and authentic life, Kierkegaard\'s aesthetic, ethical, and religious life, or Jaspers\'s "spheres," there is yet another sphere, namely, the "sphere of immaturity." This sphere or "category" is the contribution of my private existence to existentialism…. For Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn\'t awareness—that forced, extreme awareness—arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn\'t man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn\'t he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later.
    Well, as can be seen from such entries, Gombrowicz is determined to show that he is in the forefront of the conceptual battle, slugging it out with the most revered names in the philosophical fashion business. This is how we keep abreast of things in the wilds of South America. There is something engaging in his tone, too, in these diaries, a lightness, a lack of solemnity that suits the inherent shrewdness of the point Gombrowicz is making. Furtive childhood is, as it were, always lying in wait for the pompous Heideggerian. That is what animates and determines the method of Ferdydurke itself. "It is as though we were simultaneously at the table and under the table."


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    For his first novel Gombrowicz borrowed, no doubt without knowing it, a theme around in literature long before the Victorians, although it made a specially nightmare appeal to the Victorian imagination. It was the theme used in Mark Twain\'s The Prince and the Pauper and in F. Anstey\'s once immensely popular Victorian classic, Vice Versa, about the heavy Victorian father who finds he has changed places with his schoolboy son. Toad, the real hero of Kenneth Grahame\'s The Wind in the Willows, also has his persona of comfortable, over-bearing, conceited squire magicked or disguised into a reverse and humiliating role. In Ferdydurke the middle-aged hero finds himself led off back to school by a ludicrous professor.

    Such transformations could be, as Kafka saw, the terror lurking in the modern fairy story; and both Bruno Schulz and Gombrowicz may have had Kafka\'s example directly in mind. In The Street of Crocodiles the tyrannical Jewish father becomes an exceedingly lifelike cockroach, or rather a type of domestic lobster, who even temporarily survives being cooked and eaten for the family dinner. This coruscatingly pathetic and funny sequence was much admired by the Polish literary intelligentsia in the prewar years. But Gombrowicz, as he often tells us, will have nothing to do with Freudian images or significances. He takes the idea literally and simply: his hero finds himself back at school and that is all there is to it. Where nightmares or degradations are concerned there is no need to go further.

    Ferdydurke divides more or less into three parts. The school sequence is followed by grotesque French farce, the encounter with a family consisting of Mr. and Mrs. "Youthful" and their daughter Zutka; and this transforms itself into the hero—still dogged by a schoolboy "friend"—meeting up with his landowning relations at their country place. The two latter episodes are highly satirical, in the Gombrowiczian manner: the "Youthfuls" representing enlightened modernity, the new bourgeois ethos (there is a charming moment when Mrs. Youthful retires into the WC and emerges looking even more progressive and civic-minded than when she went in), and the squires in the country standing for the wholly conditioned and most classbound race imaginable.

    But Gombrowicz is not a satirist; his pictures of how people live and have their being are all the more vivid for their utter lack of the "grown-up" reforming instinct. Ferdydurke also takes an authentically child\'s-eye view of sex, a grotesque but compulsive activity that causes people to act in odd ways, and is somehow associated with backsides or bottoms, which figure largely in the general atmosphere of startled and outraged immaturity. Gombrowicz\'s greatest strength is the absolute consistency with which he sticks to "the path of pathology," never letting on that he, as author, is anything other than he appears to be in the terms of the fable. This is a rare thing, and it brings him closer to Swift or Defoe than to any "absurdist" modern writer, in all of whom one can detect the authorial manipulation from a concealed vantage point different from the one the book is offering. "Immaturity," for example, is hard to create or dissemble. Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, can now be seen to be a made-up figure, like Peter Pan, embodying the author\'s wistfulness for what he was, or thought he might have been. In his diary and novels alike Gombrowicz is all of a piece, operating, as he puts it, at the "level of our own inadequacy"; but though we feel familiar with him we never know quite where we are. He is indeed more like a piece of daily existence than like a writer whose method and tactic can be worked out.

    Gombrowicz obligingly offers in his diary a suggestion for how to read him.

    To persons who are interested in my writing technique I offer the following recipe:
    Enter the realm of dreams.
    After which begin writing the first story that comes to mind and write about twenty pages. Then read it.
    On these twenty pages, there may be one scene, a few sentences, a metaphor, which will seem exciting to you. Then write everything all over again, attempting this time to make the exciting elements the scaffolding and write, not taking reality into consideration, and striving only to satisfy the needs of your imagination.
    Sounds easy? The recipe is certainly typical of Gombrowicz\'s literalness and lack of pretension. "After which you read in the press," he goes on, "in Ferdydurke Gombrowicz wants to say…\' " But "who has decreed that one should write only when one has something to write?… Art consists in writing not what one has to say, but something altogether unexpected." He was happy to meet an Argentine writer who taught philosophy part-time, and who said his method was hay que golpear— "one must strike." "One must tear them away from the reality to which they have become accustomed," so Gombrowicz suggests in his diary. "Knowledge, whatever it is worth, from the most precise mathematics to the darkest suggestions of art, is not to calm the soul but to create a state of vibration and tension in it."

    True, and because he does not write "what he wants to say" Gombrowicz has always evaded predictability. And yet his point about the shock effect of the unexpected is only half-true, as he knows very well. Milosz has speculated about his relation to Dostoevsky and the Underground Man—the hero from under the floorboards—and Dostoevsky has indeed the same capacity to immerse the reader in the atmosphere his hero inhabits. But just by "living there" we come to take aesthetic comfort and calm in that situation; for the reader too is adaptable, and will find reassurance and familiarity in the most unlikely places. Gombrowicz is by no means as familiar as Dostoevsky, but he could become so if he were not in other ways so elusive, simultaneously close to us and far away.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Yet in some ways his life proceeded like that of any other modern intellectual. In the Argentine he continued to write novels — Cosmos, Pornografia, Transatlantic. All follow the general pattern of Ferdydurke; and Pornografia, especially, uses Gombrowicz\'s preoccupation with immaturity—in this case the fascination it can have for the elderly, who are not so much mature as set in their ways. The scene is Poland during the war, and the novel takes place in a country house, where two elderly gentlemen hatch a plot to persuade two fresh young teen-agers to go to bed with each other. The love scene never comes off, but murder does—just because the teen-agers are so innocent. The atmosphere is murky, and the story does not appear very persuasive, but Jan Kott has pointed out how well Gombrowicz understood the wartime atmosphere, which also haunts his play The Marriage.

    Like Sartre\'s Huis clos, The Marriage starts from the notion of a small group who cannot escape each other\'s company. The actual and humdrum situation of being shut up together for twelve hours or more arose from the imposition of the curfew in occupied Warsaw and Paris. Anyone who gave a "party" had his guests on his hands till next morning; there was no way they could leave or he could get rid of them. Hell is other people, but the "I" is also somebody else. As Gombrowicz puts it in his preface, "Being united, people impose upon one another this or that manner of being,…each person deforms other persons, while being at the same time deformed by them."

    Kott recalls that in the winter of 1943, at one of these all-night Warsaw parties, he saw two young men engaging in a grimacing match, in the manner made popular by the duel of faces in Ferdydurke, which the narrator watches among schoolboys after he has been metamorphosed into one of them. The two dueling young men of the wartime night in Warsaw later became famous writers—Czeslaw Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski, author of Ashes and Diamonds.

    Jan Kott writes in a preface to The Marriage that in Ferdydurke "we have the whole Gombrowicz," and that out of the duel of grimaces in Ferdydurke "developed the Gombrowiczian theory of social behavior and particularly of aggression and mutual debasement." Maybe so. But it may be, too, that Gombrowicz stayed in South America to escape the kind of typecasting that intellectuals impose upon one another. Ferdydurke is certainly a spontaneous work, but the Diary is even more so, and to the extent that it is, even more rewarding. One pays it a high compliment by saying that one would hardly guess it was written by a well-known intellectual; and this in spite of the fact that every page contains speculation and query about the human condition, brilliant perceptions and criticisms of Rimbaud or Sienkiewicz, Nietzsche or Camus. Nonetheless the spirit of openness, of innocence, of a certain dishevelment, is always present, as is a singularly personal awareness of and response to the Argentine scene, the emptiness of the pampas and islanded estuaries, the farms and estancias with their dark rooms and long avenues of eucalyptus. Gombrowicz may have been lonely in his new country, sometimes bored, often poor, working as a clerk or in some other humble occupation. His solitude indeed seems that of a truant schoolboy, but his individuality is always present, as in this late entry when he tells us about his day:

    I get up around eleven, but I put off shaving until later because it is very tiresome. Then comes breakfast, consisting of tea, baked goods, butter, and two soft eggs on the even days of the week and two hard ones on the odd. After breakfast, I get down to work, and I write until the desire to stop working overcomes my reluctance to shave. When this breakthrough occurs, I shave with pleasure.
    He puffs on his Dunhill pipe, smoking Hermes tobacco, writes for the local paper in the afternoon to earn some money, goes to supper at the Café Sorrento, spends most of the night reading books, "which, unfortunately, are not always the kind I really desire to read." He records with satisfaction the purchase of six summer shirts "on sale for a very good price." He certainly avoided being forced into the mold of a philosophical writer, although in his later books he found it harder and harder to avoid the proleptic attentions of critics like grimacing schoolboys saying "what Gombrowicz intends to say is this." Eventually he gave in and returned to Europe, to France, spiritual home of all intellectuals, where he died in 1969. The existential establishment, with their all-too-predictable fashions and slogans, embraced him in the end, and he saw that it must be so. Yet he still felt like Rabelais, who had no idea or intention of producing "pure art," or "articulating his epoch," but who "wrote the way a child pees under a bush, in order to relieve himself."



    Dancing the Polka
    By D.J. Enright
    Pornografia
    by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Alastair Hamilton
    Grove Press, 191 pp., $5.00

    Ferdydurke
    by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Eric Mosbacher
    Grove Press, 272 pp., $5.00

    Compared to Pornografia in subject matter and action, Lolita (to which Gombrowicz\'s novel bears an obvious though superficial resemblance) is a veritable Odyssey. Pornografia treats of two elderly gentlemen, visiting a country estate in Poland in 1934, who imagine and then encourage an erotic relationship between two teenagers, (a boy) and (a girl). The narrator, Gombrowicz himself, promises to explain this use of brackets, but fails to do so; never mind, the reader is more likely to resent his arch dealings with quotation marks. The tow gentlemen erect a painstaking and tremulous construction of speculation and exegesis around gestures and actions for which there are innocent and obvious explanations, thus achieving an exceptionally refined form of voyeurism in that what is being watched quite possibly does not exist.

    "Why this disgraceful passion for spying on people?" the narrator asks himself, and later tells himself, "I ought to find some other occupation, something more suitable, more serious!"—a sentiment which after a while the most patient and well-disposed reader is likely to echo. But still this minute epic of uncertainty goes on: is there, isn\'t there, something between the two youngsters? On one page they are feared to be completely indifferent to each other, which spells "the ruin of all our dreams"; on another we are told of a "warm idyll in spring," so refreshing after "stifling, gray years of horror and exhaustion…during which I had almost forgotten what beauty was. During which I had smelt nothing but the rank stench of death." This might seem to offer a clue. In a time of war, of absurdity, what can there be "more serious" or "more suitable" to do? When the narrator drives into the nearest town, he remarks casually that it had not changed, "it was just as it had been… And yet something was missing—there were no Jews." The air of disdainful remoteness from the large and vulgar events of contemporary history brings Nabokov to mind. When a Resistance leader shows up at the house, the narrator is unable to "control a vague feeling of disgust for all this décor—action, Resistance, the leader, conspiracy—like a bad novel, a late incarnation of more or less insane childhood dreams…The nation and its romanticism constituted for me an undrinkable potion concocted to spite and anger me." Like Nabokov, who can give the impression that the Russian Revolution was concocted expressly to spite him, Gombrowicz is an émigré writer.

    But this game of incitement and panderism—for the elderly gentlemen are not content to wait passively for something to happen—hardly comprises a telling alternative to the gray game of war and patriotism and politics. The apologia, or diagnosis, when it comes, is not especially cogent or engaging:

    I only took part in life like a whipped and mangy cur…But when at that age we are offered the opportunity of toying with blossom, of entering youth even at the expense of depravity, and if it appears that ugliness can still be used and absorbed by beauty, well…A temptation sweeping aside all obstacles, insurmountable! Enthusiasm, yes, what am I saying? folly, stifling, but on the other hand…No, it was mad! Quite unsuitable!
    These heart-searchings resemble nothing so much as a parody of the pact with the Devil in Thomas Mann\'s Doctor Faustus.

    The ambiguous apotheosis of youth and its freshness and beauty in contrast to the ugliness of age, the equivocal glorification of adolescence over adulthood—all this is only vaguely Humbertian. It is only vaguely anything. By the end of the book the girl\'s fiancé (a young man but not in his first youth) has been killed along with three other characters, happily not including the teenagers, unhappily not including the two old men. The much anticipated and striven-for love-making has still not been arrived at.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    ONE REALIZES and admires Gombrowicz\'s sensitiveness and subtlety, but would like to know what he is being sensitive to and subtle about. Pornografia is a skillful composition of gossamer threads, and altogether different from the pronounced (if poeticized) physicality of Lolita. Noticing the superficial kinship with Nabokov, a British reviewer has remarked that Gombrowicz festers less. True, gossamer doesn\'t fester. But this seems a doubtful point of superiority in the present case, for if a story of this sort doesn\'t fester, it is hard to see what it can do. The oldsters are not sex maniacs, they are simply incomprehensible, simply weirdies. It would seem a perverse complaint to make at a time like the present, but one is sorely tempted to reproach the book with failing to live up to its title.

    Gombrowicz\'s earlier novel, Ferdydurke (first published in English in 1961, though published in Warsaw as far back as 1937), prompts the reflection that what is amiss with Pornografia is that it isn\'t fantastic enough and so is merely odd. Ferdydurke is very nearly fantastic enough. The apparent preoccupations and theories of the later novel are already present here, indeed are more overt from the start. "If you yourself don\'t think yourself mature, how can you expect anybody else to?" And "at heart man depends on the picture of himself formed in the minds of others, even if the others are half-wits." Thus, where the elderly gentlemen of Pornografia can only watch and negotiate, the thirty-year-old hero of Ferdydurke finds he has actually turned into a fifteen-year-old schoolboy.

    "The senior is always the creation of the junior…Are we not fatally in love with youth?" And so we are treated to some ludicrous instances of "old age obsequiously toadying to athletic youth." We are also treated to the asexual voyeurism offered by the later book, But the affinity here is seen to be with Sterne\'s Tristram Shandy rather than with Nabokov. There is a comparable mingling of satire, more or less good-natured observations on human nature, a measure of deliberate and cheerful absurdity, and anecdotage for the sheer sake of anecdotage. There is also a similar mystification (the brackets in Pornografia are reminiscent of Sterne\'s black and marbled pages beneath which many truths "lie mystically hidden") and the author displays a like habit of addressing the reader in admonitory or encouraging or pseudo-explicatory style. "So I invite all those who wish to plunge still deeper and get a still better idea of what it is all about to turn to the next page and read my Philimor Honeycombed with Childishness, for its mysterious symbolism contains the answer to all tormenting questions."

    I doubt whether without knowing of the book\'s strange and sad publishing history and its suppression in Poland one would have spotted its supposed (and premonitory) political relevance, ther one would have spotted its supposed (and premonitory) political relevance, though one perceives and appreciates its timeless and unlocalized mockery, as in the interchange with the headmaster,

    "Would you like to see the teaching body?"
    "With the greatest of pleasure," Pimko replied. "It is well known that nothing has a greater effect on the mind than the body…."
    and his description of his staff as "the best brains in the capital…Not one of them has an idea of his own in his head…All the members of my staff are perfect pupils, and they teach nothing that they have not been taught." The book\'s superiority to Pornografia consists in its density of anecdote and even (however "unrealistic") of character—among other items there is a very funny bedroom scene involving an unusually large cast—and its greater willingness to be comic, grotesque, wild, fantastic. Frothier on the surface, it nonetheless impresses as a more substantial piece of work. Perhaps it doesn\'t make much more sense than Pornografia, but it certainly provides more amusement.

    "What a bore is the everlasting question: What did you mean by Ferdydurke?" Gombrowicz has written in his Diaries. "Come, come, be more sensuous, less cerebral, start dancing with the book instead of asking for meanings." He is against interpretation, it would seem. And yet there are passages in Ferdydurke so shrill and insistent (and passages so repetitious and tedious) that they will scarcely be denied "interpretation": what else could they be crying out like that for? Even so, you can dance with the book quite merrily for much of the time, whereas with Pornografia you won\'t stagger more than a few steps before tripping over your partner.
    Hermes Trismegistus
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    5#
    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者
    先谢过。提供的资料是我需要的3.5倍。
    《费迪杜克》已被翻译成汉语。译林出版。基本上没有学者提起。按照波兰语发音被翻成《费尔迪杜凯》。
    对不起我偷懒了,因为打字的原因,懒得转成外语。所以让你费了周折。
    我也不喜欢桑塔格。我猜她可能有些妙语可以启发我来反对她。
    我看到《新共和》有一篇文章称贡布罗维奇是“波兰文学中最伟大的朋克。”好笑。
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    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:21 |只看该作者
    我再搜集一些资料, 咱们可以合作搞出一组东西来.
    Hermes Trismegistus
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    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:22 |只看该作者
    那当然好了。不过具体怎么操作?
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    8#
    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:22 |只看该作者
    我是建议一下. 比如可以翻译几篇评论.
    问题是我没有中文译本,也不知道具体怎么样.
    Hermes Trismegistus
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    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:22 |只看该作者
    译得还行。北外的易丽君。多年翻译显克维奇。这次翻译贡布罗维奇是因为今年是贡布罗维奇年,波兰好像很支持。
    书做的仓促。错字多。版权页的贡布罗维奇的波兰文名字都错了。
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    发表于 2007-8-4 13:05:22 |只看该作者
    原来如此, 是从原问翻译的吗? 耶鲁版的英译据说水平不错.

    我的MSN

    luciferwang@hotmail.com
    Hermes Trismegistus
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