So Much for the Granta
Words Without Borders has an intriguing excerpt from Gombrowicz in Argentina, which appears to never have been fully translated into English.
Rita Gombrowicz’s Gombrowicz in Argentina (Gombrowicz en Argentine, 1984) and Gombrowicz in Europe (Gombrowicz en Europe, 1988) pull together her years of research into Witold Gombrowicz’s life and work, along with her recently launched Web site on the author, www.gombrowicz.net. The books are structured as a unique biographical pastiche, comprised of interviews, commentary, photographs, and other ephemera tracing the writer’s path from Poland to Argentina, where he spent twenty-four years in exile, beginning at the outbreak of the Second World War; to Germany, where he was invited as a Ford Foundation scholar; and, finally, to France. For reasons of censorship in communist Poland, France had long served as the seat of Gombrowicz’s literary career, thanks initially to the Polish Literary Institute in Paris and its journal Kultura.
During two research trips to Argentina, in April 1973 and for six months between 1978 and 1979, Rita Gombrowicz found that her husband’s friends and contacts neither lauded nor diminished the writer in interviews, but “made him come alive again in his games, his idiosyncrasies, his peculiarities all while preserving his human dimension.”
In The Quarterly Conversation we serialized a chapter from Gombrowicz’s most recently translated novel, Pornografia (and, believe me, every day this page disappoints many eager Googlers).
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Very cool, thanks scott. Gombrowicz is a personal favorite so I’ll certainly check out her website.