SECONDING GOMBROWICZ A Translator’s Introduction to Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr’s Ferdydurke

Allen J. Kuharski

itold Gombrowicz’s first novel Ferdydurke, originally published in Warsaw in 1937, remains one of his most effective acts of literary Wprovocation, 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

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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 score. He considered his play The Marriage (1944) his most important work, and the heightened poetic language of the play in Polish is as original and daunting to translate as Ferdydurke or (perhaps most extraordinar- ily) the neo-baroque Polish of his second novel Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz’s combination of sophisticated language, farcical action, and social critique in works such as Ivona, Princess of Burgundia or Ferdydurke places him in the tradition of high comedy that began with Aristophanes and Molière. With the significant exception of Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (which is available in an excellent translation by Krystyna Griffith-Jones and Catherine Robins), the greatest barrier to the successful theatrical production of Gombrowicz’s works in English to date may indeed be that of the translation.

The theatricality of works such as Ferdydurke, The Marriage, and History, attracted no less of an artist than Tadeusz Kantor, and indeed Ferdydurke was among the inspirations for Kantor’s most celebrated work, The Dead Class, first performed in 1975. The visual, musical, and choreographic brilliance of Kantor’s work, however, belied the complex verbal play of Gombrowicz’s theatre, no less for Polish than for foreign audiences. Within a year of the premiere of The Dead Class, Teatr Provisorium of Lublin presented their first stage adaptation of Ferdydurke, in their debut as one of the brightest stars in Poland’s vibrant student theatre movement in the 1970s. This first stage adaptation of the novel per se marked the beginning of a remarkable tradition of stage adaptations of the novel in Poland and elsewhere. Over two dozen stage adaptations of Ferdydurke have been produced in a half-dozen countries to date, in addition to Jerzy Skolimowski’s lavish but ill-fated British- Polish film version in 1991. Teatr Provisorium’s second adaptation of the text (produced after their merger with Kompania Teatr in 1996) premiered in Lublin in 1998, and to date has been performed in Polish more than 200 times in over a dozen

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049337 by guest on 26 September 2021 The sixteen-year-old Witold Gombrowicz in 1920. Taken just after his military service in the Polish-Russian War of 1920, in which the newly-independent Poland defeated the armies of Soviet Russia. Photo: Courtesy Archives of Rita Gombrowicz.

Witold Gombrowicz’s passport photo, dated 1939. Gombrowicz turned thirty-five that year. Gombrowicz left Poland for Argentina in August, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He never returned before his death in 1969. Photo: Courtesy Archives of Rita Gombrowicz.

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The English-language version of the text was first commissioned for performance at Swarthmore College in February, 2000, and has since been performed over fifty times in the United States, Scotland, Egypt, and Poland. In January 2001, the English-language version was nominated in Warsaw for the prestigious “Passport” Award in theatre, roughly Poland’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize. In August 2001, the English-language version was given a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it received wide coverage in the Scottish and British press. The production has just completed its third tour of the United States in as many years, including a three-week run at La MaMa in New York City in November, 2001. The company’s performances in the United States and Great Britain marked the first tour by a professional Polish company performing Gombrowicz in the English-speaking world. That the company was prepared to perform in both Polish and English has made the potential impact of this first contact all the greater. In fact, Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr was the first Polish company to attempt such a bilingual tour in the United States since the days of Helena Modjeska’s celebrated bilingual performances of Shakespeare a century ago.

Danuta Borchardt’s award-winning translation of the novel provided the foundation for our work on the English-language version of Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr’s stage adaptation. The company and I worked for a period of almost six months on adapting Borchardt’s text to the specific needs of the project and rehearsing the four actors in English, whose knowledge of the language at the beginning ran the gamut from almost complete ignorance to complete fluency. The acting style of the production is extremely physical and rhythmically precise. The comic effect throughout is, as always in comedy or farce, dependent on split-second timing. Many of the changes we made in Borchardt’s text were done in the name of preserving the rhythmic integrity of the performance already established in the Polish version. The work on the text was ultimately a collective effort between the actors and myself, and I now strongly believe that such a bilingual “committee” provides the ideal circumstances for any theatrical or literary translation. The luxury of having four superb actors and two talented and erudite directors as “partners” in the translation process was a rare privilege and pleasure.

The physical comedy is of course combined with Gombrowicz’s verbal playfulness, which for the adolescent schoolyard world of the play demands a very specific cultural-historical “voice” for the jokes to work. The truest test of achieving a native speaker’s knowledge of a second language may in fact be the mastery of the idioms of the grade school playground, which of course are also generational markers. As dramaturg for the English-language version of the piece, I proposed an “American” voice for the text that went beyond Borchardt’s version, in part because it was the voice I felt I could place with greatest precision. The linguistic milieu for the play’s action became an elite Catholic prep school in Chicago in the 1930s, a world where

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049337 by guest on 26 September 2021 adolescent Polish-American boys would plausibly speak with the same accents as the actors performing in English. The immediacy of this American voice has played well on this side of the Atlantic, especially among bilingual Polish émigrés, as well as in Poland itself. It initially caused some anxiety with the company’s backers and promoters for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, who feared a negative reaction to this unexpected mix of American and Polish voices from British audiences and critics. To our great relief and satisfaction, the popular and critical response to the production in Edinburgh was consistently positive, with the Fringe First citation acknowledging the text in particular.

Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr’s adaptation is a radical cutting of the novel, on paper consisting of roughly six percent of the original text. Nevertheless, every word spoken on stage is taken verbatim from Gombrowicz, with the exception only of a spontaneous expletive or two. The most significant departures from Gombrowicz’s text are contained in the production’s two dumb shows, which paraphrase or expand upon themes and images in the novel without always having a specific referent. The stage directions included here are my contribution, transcribed from the action of the finished production and not based on Gombrowicz’s text. The actors and directors carry these specifications in their memories, and had never considered recording them in writing until I asked to do so. At some point in the near future, we plan to translate the stage directions into Polish as well, completing the circle of the text’s journey from Polish to English and back again.

To translate Gombrowicz is to second him in two senses of the word: to join his side in his often quixotic (and now posthumous) duel with the world and to assume the role of his literary and theatrical stand-in. I have never been more acutely aware of the curious conjunction between the work of the actor and that of the translator as virtual voices for an absent author. To translate Gombrowicz is also an attempt to perform Gombrowicz in its own way as immediate as the actor playing the writer’s self-portrait in Ferdydurke, the narrator/protagonist Joseph. As Gombrowicz the playwright certainly understood, however, the dramatic text always seeks the body and voice of a talented actor no less avidly than such an actor seeks a great text.

Janusz Oprynski, the production’s co-director with Witold Mazurkiewicz, calls the production’s acting and dramaturgy “biological” in approach. If my work with Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr has succeeded in embodying Gombrowicz’s theatre in English, of bringing text and actor’s body together into an expressive whole across the barriers of time, language, and culture, then our common work has accom- plished its mission. I can only hope that the experience of reading the following script apart from the actual performance evokes something of the play of eloquent voices and suffering and ecstatic bodies that Gombrowicz’s novel has inspired.

ALLEN J. KUHARSKI is the Director of the Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore College. He has previously translated (with Dariusz Bukowski)

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