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Under Latin American Eyes Witold Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literature

by Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska (Author)
©2024 Monographs 280 Pages
Series: Cross-Roads, Volume 34

Summary

This book explores the influence and reception of Witold Gombrowicz’s works in Argentina, where he spent over two decades and wrote much of his oeuvre. It examines the "Gombrowicz effect" in Argentinian literature, investigating who read his works, how his themes were integrated or ignored, and his impact on Argentinian culture and literature.
Using comparative literature methods, the author analyses the case of Gombrowicz’s literary appropriation. The study starts with key Spanish translations of Gombrowicz’s texts and then assesses a series of Argentinian critical essays on his works. It focuses significantly on Argentinian writers, such as Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, and Osvaldo Lamborghini, who were influenced by Gombrowicz and engaged critically with his literature and his legendary life in Argentina.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction: On the Invidious Praxis of Comparison
  • 1. Comparative Studies, World Literature, and a Different Literary History
  • The Method
  • The Eye of the Other, or What Can a Foreigner Get from Polish Literature
  • On the Functioning in a Foreign Culture: The Problem of Reception
  • World Literature
  • Intertextual Research. Anything Goes?
  • What Is Known About the “Argentinian Gombrowicz?”
  • Argentine Stakes in the Quest for Gombrowicz
  • 2. What Gombrowicz Do Argentinians Read? On the Translations
  • Argentinian Ferdydurke
  • The Marriage – A Combined Translation
  • Argentine Diary: Reconstructing the Past
  • “I Will Suggest a Different Solution, Presumably the Best”
  • “Did You Consider Who Will Write a Preface to Your Diary?”
  • “Polish, And Especially Your Style, Is Better Rendered in Spanish”
  • “In This Book, There Will Certainly Be Some Content That Will Not Be Liked, or Will Raise Objections, Etc. Even Better”
  • Other Translations
  • 3. Argentinian Criticism of Gombrowicz
  • On the Argentinian National Identity
  • Gombrowicz As an Argentinian Writer
  • On Space: Journey, Exile, Migration
  • Juvenility and Corporeality
  • On Language and Translation
  • The Story of the “I”
  • Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literary Canon
  • 4. Places of Reading: Gombrowicz Read by Argentinian Writers
  • “Literal”: Germán García
  • Osvaldo Lamborghini
  • Copi
  • César Aira
  • Ricardo Piglia
  • Precarious Relations: Julio Cortázar, and Juan José Saer
  • The “Disciples” of Gombrowicz
  • The Circle of Gombrowicz
  • “Backwater Fads”
  • Other Readings
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Index of Names
  • Series Index

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISSN 2191-6179
ISBN 978-3-631-87427-1 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-91855-5 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-91856-2 (E-PUB)
DOI 10.3726/b21850

About the author

The Author
Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwon´ska is an Associate Professor specializing in Latin American literature at the University of Lodz, Poland. Her academic pursuits are centered around comparative literature, the contemporary Argentinian novel, and Jewish Latin American fiction.

About the book

Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwon´ska

Under Latin American Eyes
Witold Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literature

This book explores the influence and reception of Witold Gombrowicz’s works in Argentina, where he spent over two decades and wrote much of his oeuvre. It examines the “Gombrowicz effect” in Argentinian literature, investigating who read his works, how his themes were integrated or ignored, and his impact on Argentinian culture and literature. Using comparative literature methods, the author analyses the case of Gombrowicz’s literary appropriation. The study starts with key Spanish translations of Gombrowicz’s texts and then assesses a series of Argentinian critical essays on his works. It focuses significantly on Argentinian writers, such as Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, and Osvaldo Lamborghini, who were influenced by Gombrowicz and engaged critically with his literature and his legendary life in Argentina.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

Introduction: On the Invidious Praxis of Comparison

1. Comparative Studies, World Literature, and a Different Literary History

The Method

The Eye of the Other, or What Can a Foreigner Get from Polish Literature

On the Functioning in a Foreign Culture: The Problem of Reception

World Literature

Intertextual Research. Anything Goes?

What Is Known About the “Argentinian Gombrowicz?”

Argentine Stakes in the Quest for Gombrowicz

2. What Gombrowicz Do Argentinians Read? On the Translations

Argentinian Ferdydurke

The Marriage – A Combined Translation

Argentine Diary: Reconstructing the Past

“I Will Suggest a Different Solution, Presumably the Best”

“Did You Consider Who Will Write a Preface to Your Diary?”

“Polish, And Especially Your Style, Is Better Rendered in Spanish”

“In This Book, There Will Certainly Be Some Content That Will Not Be Liked, or Will Raise Objections, Etc. Even Better”

Other Translations

3. Argentinian Criticism of Gombrowicz

On the Argentinian National Identity

Gombrowicz As an Argentinian Writer

On Space: Journey, Exile, Migration

Juvenility and Corporeality

On Language and Translation

The Story of the “I”

Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literary Canon

4. Places of Reading: Gombrowicz Read by Argentinian Writers

“Literal”: Germán García

Osvaldo Lamborghini

Copi

César Aira

Ricardo Piglia

Precarious Relations: Julio Cortázar, and Juan José Saer

The “Disciples” of Gombrowicz

The Circle of Gombrowicz

“Backwater Fads”

Other Readings

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Names

Introduction: On the Invidious Praxis of Comparison

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) is known as a Polish writer and playwright who belongs to the world literature canon because of his monumental Diary and the novel Ferdydurke. We usually treat Gombrowicz’s connections with Argentina – where he lived from 1939 to 1963 – as a life-related curiosity, eagerly noted in the biographies of the writer, but deprived of much significance from the perspective of the meaning of his work or philosophical and literary implications contained within it. Even though Gombrowicz lived abroad for years (first in Argentina, then in France), he never abandoned his mother tongue, writing exclusively in Polish. Indeed, the country of his birth considers him one of the greatest if not the greatest national writer. Without denying his otherwise obvious belonging to the Polish canon, I will look at Gombrowicz’s oeuvre from the Argentinian point of view, that is to say, as works belonging to this country’s literary tradition. Such reading is aligned with Argentinian interpretative practice since Argentinians themselves do not perceive Gombrowicz as a foreign writer, but rather a native one, even if his work does not belong to the mainstream national literature. As I will explain in detail below, the fact that he did not write in Spanish was not an obstacle to this “annexation.” Argentinians argue, not unrightfully, that it was their country where Gombrowicz wrote most of his books: Trans-Atlantyk, The Marriage, Pornography, a lion’s share of Diary, and most of Cosmos and Kronos.

My book, then, will not be a study of Gombrowicz’s life in Argentina,1 and the biographical matters will be addressed only marginally – wherever they are necessary for the understanding of how Argentinians read his works. The main purpose of this book is to trace the “Gombrowicz effect” in Argentinian literature, and to answer the following questions: Who has read his works and in what ways? What has been filtered out of the works? Where in Argentinian culture can we find Gombrowicz’s traces and themes? The assumptions that surround the comparative studies on the reception of the author in another national culture that I propose may cause some discomfort to the readers familiar with classical interpretations of Gombrowicz’s works. This discomfort would stem from the conviction that, in his uniqueness, Gombrowicz escapes interpretative control. This, in turn, happens precisely because they heavily privilege the context of reception, giving it the right to (over)interpret the text received “from the outside.” In other words, the “Argentinian Gombrowicz” that I present will tell much more about Argentinian literature than about Gombrowicz himself. Only such an approach, focused on the receiving culture, makes it possible to avoid criticizing Argentinians for mistakes and inconsistencies in their understanding compared to Polish criticism: their doxa in the light of Polish episteme. Naturally, such a pragmatically directed research method – intended to indicate how Gombrowicz “acts” in the literary universe of his adopted homeland – requires some conscious concessions to the target culture.

The most important one would be the permission to read Gombrowicz as an Argentinian writer, which seems to be a challenging task, not only because of the Polish national sentiment but because of the need to suspend the Polish context of genesis and reception of Gombrowicz’s work. The native and the universal circumstances of the works’ creation (undoubtedly present, despite his gradual “entering into Argentina”2) and the “Gombrowicz studies” (Gombrowiczologia) that have emerged around them remain of little importance here. In turn, the “Argentinization” of Gombrowicz also means renouncing the recent transcultural perspective which is gladly accepted by comparatists. The perspective involves the study of literary creations not so much in isolation from the culture in which they were produced, but in isolation, or freedom, from all cultural constraints, perceived as a prison for individual experience. The typically Argentinian reading of Gombrowicz is far from such an understanding, reluctant to abandon native reference points. Even today, when Hispanic literature seemingly enters the path to globalization, glorifying various post-national identities, Argentinians continue to read Gombrowicz as their own writer, worthy of referencing in their strictly national contexts, although at the same time they perceive his work as a borderline case in their literature, otherwise fairly open to foreignness (after all, he wrote in Polish).

In the first chapter of the monograph, I discuss in detail the research method that will then serve to analyze the “Gombrowicz effect” in the literature of the La Plata region. The reader that is uninterested in the methodological issues may proceed to the next chapter in which I cover the Spanish translations of Gombrowicz’s works, often significantly different from the Polish originals, for Argentinian versions of Ferdydurke, The Marriage, and Diary were rewritten or updated by Gombrowicz, which alters the scope of acceptable interpretative possibilities. I devote the next chapter to map the loci communes that Argentinian criticism sets for the work of Gombrowicz – such as corporeality and youth, language, travel and exile, and configuration of the literary “self” – always determined based on the internal dynamics of the local literature. The introduction to these considerations presents a brief reconstruction of the historical and critical process which enabled the “Argentinization” of Gombrowicz. The last and the longest chapter of this monograph is about the “use” of Gombrowicz by contemporary Argentinian writers, often representing very distant esthetics which, in turn, led them to create various precursors, other Gombrowiczes, by accentuating the various components of his work. I adopt 1970 as the symbolic starting point of my research, to focus on the interpretations unmediated by Gombrowicz’s self-commentary – he left Argentina forever in 1963, and his works gradually “freed” themselves from the burden of Gombrowicz’s legend as the provocateur and the enfant terrible of the literary scene, and the group of his works’ commentators was no longer limited to the circle of close friends.


1 This issue has already been covered in many books and articles, of which the most important ones are Rita Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz en Argentine 1939–1963 (Paris: Denoël, 1970), and Klementyna Suchanow, Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz, Vol. 1–2 (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2017).

2 Witold Gombrowicz, Kronos (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013), p. 83.

1. Comparative Studies, World Literature, and a Different Literary History

In this chapter, I primarily reflect on the suitability of the methodological tools which I have chosen to analyze the case of “Argentinian Gombrowicz.” I begin with a general discussion of the comparative literature, the advantages and disadvantages attributed to it, and the hopes placed therein. Then, I proceed to the issue of reception conditions of a foreign writer in national literature. Here, I especially ponder the specifically Polish context, both from the perspective of the “attractiveness” of Polish literature for a foreign reader and how it “annexes” foreign writers. Next, I check to what extent the research tools based on the theory of “world literature” (of Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch) are used in the research on the creativity transfer of Gombrowicz to Argentinian culture. I also discuss the category of “intertextuality” and set boundaries to the “approved intertextuality” for the literary analyses in later chapters. I conclude this chapter with a brief review of the current state of knowledge of the reception of the work and the legend of Gombrowicz in Argentina.

The Method

The research on the reception of Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina is undoubtedly of interest for the comparative studies which over recent decades have earned a multitude of epithets: aside from the traditional comparative literature, there are also comparative interdisciplinary, cultural, and media studies.1 Furthermore, this field shares its object of study with the postcolonial reflection (and a spectrum of political approaches proper to it), theory and practice of “world literature,” translation studies, and the proposed “possible history of literature.”2 Depending on the adopted perspective, comparative studies absorb those fields, intermingle with them, or become part of those fields, accepting that they are unstable and “undisciplined” as the price of such a broad research horizon. At the same time, however, the opponents of comparative studies allege that they lack a proper object of study and are parasitic on related disciplines, particularly national philologies.3 Together with the troubling abundance of terminology, this multidimensional quality makes the researchers who deal with literary (or cultural) texts from this perspective feel obliged to determine, by extensively referring to theoretical works, the actual type of comparative studies they aim to conduct.

Details

Pages
280
Publication Year
2024
ISBN (PDF)
9783631918555
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631918562
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631874271
DOI
10.3726/b21850
Language
English
Publication date
2024 (April)
Keywords
Witold Gombrowicz Argentinian literature comparative literature literary translation Ricardo Piglia César Aira national identity autobiographical writings exile
Published
Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2024. 280 pp.

Biographical notes

Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska (Author)

Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwon´ska is an Associate Professor specializing in Latin American literature at the University of Lodz, Poland. Her academic pursuits are centered around comparative literature, the contemporary Argentinian novel, and Jewish Latin American fiction.

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Title: Under Latin American Eyes Witold Gombrowicz in Argentinian Literature