The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. Trans. Danuta BorchardtPaul Maliszewski
Witold Gombrowicz. Ferdydurke. Trans. Danuta Borchardt. Foreword Susan Sontag. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 281 pp. Paper: $14.95.
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 naïvete 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. [Paul Maliszewski]