Tag: Witold Gombrowicz

surreal oil painting showing a person translating text from one language to another

Journal (The art of translation)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Translation is a tricky endeavour, and you can easily spot the problems if you happen to know both the language of the original text and of the translation, as it happened for me in the case of Diary by my favourite Polish intellectualist, Witold Gombrowicz, which I have in two editions, original and translated into English, and frankly, I’m not particularly fond of the latter.

This particular text aside, it’s one thing if the root of the problem lies in semantic equivalence, but it’s something else entirely if contortions, whether accidental or intentional, come into play, as in the quotation from Cicero’s Tusculanæ Disputationes that I found in The Essays of Montaigne—Volume 05 by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton. “Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam literis, persequuti sunt.” is translated as “They have proceeded to this discipline of living well, which of all arts is the greatest, by their lives, rather than by their reading.”

Apart from the fact that in the original this is not an independent sentence but the conclusion of a longer one, it has misspelt two words since the original text is “hanc amplissimam omnium artium, bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam litteris persecuti sunt.” (Tusculanae Disputationes, M. Tullius Cicero, M. Pohlenz, Leipzig, 1918), and in translation by Charles Duke Yonge, for example, it reads as follows: “yet promoted this most extensive of all arts, the principle of living well, even more by their life than by their writings.”

Someone might accuse me of nitpicking details, but I see fundamental differences between “proceeded” and “promoted”, and “their reading” and “their writings”.

oil painting of two friends talking at a table in a cafe

Journal (Forgive me)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I envy Étienne de La Boétie. Not only was he himself a man of many virtues, but he was also endowed with a great friendship, which lasted long after his untimely death, with another great Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne. Reading Montaigne’s letters published in William Carew Hazilitt’s 1877 edition of the Essays is moving proof of this.

I have always been touched by friendship, something I’ve never really experienced myself. I remember how fascinated I was reading the correspondence between Stanisław Lem and Sławomir Mrożek, or by the traces of friendship with Jerzy Giedroyć that I found in Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary (it turns out that their letters were also published—the book is certainly worth reading, so I have to add it to my list).

Unfortunately, the one time I had a chance for this type of connection, I ruined it due to my own artificiality of style. No sane person would agree to correspondence clearly conducted with publication in mind. I don’t even know what I was thinking then. This was back when online literary forums were popular. At one of them, I met someone who was a kindred spirit and also a literary scholar. He appreciated my poetry, and when I wrote a satirical drama, he simply loved it. After the forum was closed down, we kept in touch via e-mail, but when, after reading Mrożek’s and Lem’s letters, I started my strange styling, he fell silent. I regretted it, but the damage was done. I guess I wasn’t ready for a real connection with another human being—it was all just a stage play. Stupid really.

We have this saying in my native language: A Pole is wise after the damage. It’s a pity that the damage is required. What can I say other than forgive me, Piotr?

transatlantic liner on a cruise

Journal (Diary is my Bible)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I watched A Single Man this afternoon. I’ve seen this film so many times that I’ve lost count. I have a habit of watching films that make an exceptionally great impression on me over and over again, sometimes even several times a day if time allows. This was the case, for example, with Mr. Nobody, directed by Jaco Van Dormael, which, by the way, wasn’t the only film of his that I liked so much—The Brand New Testament also received its fair share of my time. Another one is Columbus, Kogonada’s directorial debut, a new discovery that I still relish. But this doesn’t just apply to relatively new films. For example, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is also on my list.

When I think about it, there is no denying that I am a film buff. However, I can’t think of many books to which I have returned often. While still a teenager, I had a period when I read Honoré de Balzac’s Father Goriot several times—by the way, one of only a few books that made me cry. Of course, I had my favourite authors, and I read almost everything they wrote—Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Saul Bellow, to name just two—but the book that is always at my fingertips is Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary. Strangely enough, apart from Diary, of all he wrote, I have only read Ferdydurke and Trans-Atlantyk, and neither of these two made any significant impression on me. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t bad; I just don’t feel like I would have missed out if I hadn’t read them, while Diary is my Bible.

oil portrait of a thoughtful man with a beard

Journal (My life is my story)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski3 Comments

As of today, I have decided to stop writing poetry. To tell the truth, I’ve been planning to do this for quite some time now. And no, I am not aping Rimbaud, whose level, by the way, I am not even remotely close to. I simply feel like a fraud with a fig leaf of a quote from Apology, where Socrates said that “not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” And even if I manage to write something decent from time to time, most of my literary output is mediocre at best. It’s true that I had my moment when I was still writing in Polish and a series of my poems were published in one of the most important literary magazines in Poland, but this is ancient history now.

I stopped writing in Polish, and what’s more, I even stopped reading in my mother tongue. It was not a whim but a conscious decision to motivate myself to dive deeper into the language and culture of my new homeland instead of closing myself in a ghetto like many of my compatriots in emigration. By the way, I still feel a tinge of embarrassment when I remember the sight of satellite dishes mounted on kitchen walls near the wide open windows in the apartments of Polish emigrants to receive Polish TV because mounting satellite dishes on the outer walls of skyscrapers was prohibited for security reasons. If anything, it was the end of a bloody November, and believe me, that’s not fun on the Scottish coast. I can’t even imagine how cold it must have been in those apartments.

So, instead of waiting for another divine inspiration, I decided to start writing a journal, partly because my attempts at writing novels had failed since they were always nothing but a flash in the pan—I’m working on that—and also because of a lack of ideas for interesting stories. A journal definitely sorts the latter problem out—my life is my story. Moreover, the masterpiece of my favourite writer, Witold Gombrowicz, is his diary, which, by the way, I have in the original and in English translation, and I regularly return to both. So why not follow my master’s example, even if my chances of writing anything worth publishing are rather slim?