Trans-Atlantyk: An Alternate Translation

★★★★☆ 4/5

Borchardt explains in her note at the beginning of "Trans-Atlantyk: An Alternate Translation" (Yale Press 2014) that Gombrowicz wrote Trans-Atlantyk in the style of a gaweda or "fire side chat," "a tale, a mode of interaction at social gatherings of the sixteenth to nineteenth-century Sarmatian Polish nobility in their country manors." The style of the gaweda was reflected in seventeenth-century Polish literature; there's no Anglophone equivalent, so Borchardt made the bold decision to incorporate the "vocabulary and rhythm" of roughly contemporaneous English-language literature such as the works for Swift, Sterne and Melville.<br/><br/>I can't compare it to the Polish, but this antiquated style fits perfectly with the picaresque story narrated in Trans-Atlantyk. The novel begins with Gombrowicz's alter-ego and narrator arriving by steamship in Buenos Aires right before the outbreak of WWII. When news hits that Germany's invaded Poland and war's been declared, he chooses to stay behind in Argentina rather than sail back to Europe with his compatriots (aware that some might see this as turning his back on his country). This all actually happened to Gombrowicz; but the rest of the novel is not so much a fictionalized autobiography as it is an anachronistic, comic farce that could in some ways be compared to Gulliver's Travels, Candide or Don Quixote. It also makes me think of Kafka's Amerika.<br/><br/>It's an entertaining story with a number of unexpected turns, but there's also political satire (e.g., wait and see what His Excellency the Polish Envoy to Argentina gets up to in order to demonstrate his country's greatness while across the sea Poland is being destroyed by the Nazis). Trans-Atlantyk definitely stands out from the other Gombrowicz novels I've read.

3/1/2026