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.