twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 4:37 pm
wba wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 10:20 am
FERDYDURKE by Gombrowicz, which is great, but it seems all translations are of the edited 2nd polish version from the 50s and the first published Polish edition from 1937 hasn't been translated into any "western" languages.
Which really sucks!
Or do any of you guys know better and can direct me to a foreign translation of the original text from the 1930s?
Too bad I can't read Polish, though.
i last read the danuta borchardt translation (2000), wasn't aware it wasn't from the original version. gombrowicz is one of my favourite authors, like top 3 (him, walser & klossowski) but i'm thankful enough it got translated from polish at all, half of his other books came to english via french. (although whatever confected mish-mash of interpretations landed me the first version of cosmos i read, it was a blessing anyway)
been a bit down lately so had to reach for a reserve 'held for emergency' book, one of those even though i've never read it guaranteed to cheer me up and it coincidentally is a gombrowicz - his trans-atlantyk. delightfully gombrowicz-y. also, just calling people shitheads over and over is my sense of humour.
This was my first Gombrowicz and it was fantastic, defintiely a new favorite, and I will check out his other stuff in the coming years (coincidentally I have Trans-Atlantik as a paperback at home, which was my first Gombrowicz I bought a few years ago, so maybe this one will be next). Most of Gombrowiczs novels came out in (West) Germany translated from polish during the 1960s, as there was a little "boom" after Ferdydurke got published in German in an excellent translation/interpretation in 1960. Since then there have been a few "complete works" editions. But as is often the case, they aren't really complete.
As far as I could gather, Gombrowicz himself revised (some parts of) Ferdydurke and this second version got published in Poland in 1954(?) and is the version all other translations after 1954 are seemingly based on.
It's not uncommon for writers to return to previously published material and rewrite it a bit: Friedrich Dürrenmatt did this extensively and numerous times with a lot of his works for example, and I know that Blanchot did this with some of his novels and also some surrealists like Louis Aragon and André Breton (for "Nadja", originally published in 1928) for example.
I'm currently reading Swiss author Gottfried Keller's "The People of Seldwyla" which was originally published in 1856, and though I'm reading it in a wonderful annotated edition with like 200 pages of alternate versions, explanations and other great stuff, the "scientific" consensus in academic literary criticism in Germany seems to be that the last authorized edition of the writer is the ultimate one, the one referred to etc. etc. which SUCKS BIG TIME. So I cannot actually read the publication from 1856, but have to read the revised edition from the second printing from 1875 (though thank god the "variants" that have been left out in the second edition at least are published scattered through the appendix, so I can piece the original version together). In my opinion, all versions should always be published, especially if collections are called or advertised as "the Complete works of...".
But I guess if you're not Franz Kafka - where you have even the original manuscripts in his handwriting published in Germany
- you have to suffer.
Another recent example I found - of a somewhat different kind, though - was the novel "Der Überläufer" by Wilhelm Lehmann (who has a mastery of the German language comparable to Nietzsche or Rilke). The novel was completed in 1927 but was rejected by many publishing houses of the Weimar republic during the late 1920s because it was not commercial enough and wouldn't sell, and Lehmann was unable to find a publisher until 1960... When the novel finally got published in 1962, huge chunks of it (some 50 to 100 pages) were excised, though Lehmann reportedly agreed to this and also rewrote parts of the novel, so the parts that were left out wouldn't affect other parts of the novel too much. Still, no one has had the idea so far (there have been "complete" editions of "all" of his work since then in the German language) to publish the original manuscript from 1927 (though some of it has sbeen published in appendixes of academic editions as well). Another novel, curiously also titled "Der Überläufer" by Siegfried Lenz (who has been similarly popular, and is at least as important in West German literature after WWII as Günther Grass or Heinrich Böll) had also been rejected by his publishing house in 1952 and was only published after his death in 2016 (and then became a bestseller). I mention the novel by Lenz, cause both books deal with German deserters during the war, Lehmann's iduring WWI, the work by Lenz with a deserter during WWII, so both were also withheld because of political reasons.
A positive recent example of a different kind was Hans Fallada's mega-bestseller "Kleiner Mann - was nun?" ("Little Man, What Now?" in English) which was originally published in 1932 and has had more than 70 German reprints since, but has finally been published in its originally intended form in 2016, almost 85 years later... As Fallada's publishers thought the manuscript too long and not commercial enough in 1931 (they especially didn't like Fallada criticizing the Nazis and the followers of the NSDAP and all of the leftist political views of the main characters as well as much of the more explicitly sexual content), he had to leave out about one fourth of the material, which was about 150 pages.
So these are like 3 examples of (probably mostly) "political" censorship in the Weimar Republic as well as West Germany, which in 2 cases led to the novels not being published at all for some decades.
Anyway, to finish my rambling: I want to read Gombrowiczs first published edition of FERDYDURKE from 1937 as well now, and I don't want to learn Polish first to be able to do so.
PS: I've bought some Walser in recent months and hope to start reading his stuff as well in the near future. Unfortunately I'm also not familiar with Klossowski at all, so far (had to look him up
) though I remember you mentioning him (in a book on something with Nietzsche, if I'm not mistaken?).
PPS: I'm also really interested in reading "Pamietnik z okresu dojrzewania" ("Memoirs from puberty" or lit. "Memoirs from the time of immaturity"), Gombrowicz's first published book, a collection of stories he had written earlier, I believe, and which also got published in the late 50s in an extended edition under the title "Bakakaj". Have you read it, is it anything like (parts of) Ferdydurke?
)
