Life behind an Author's Works--Memoir of a Translator: How I Came to Translate Witold Gombrowicz and the Many Faces of Thom

By Danuta Borchardt

This book is my memoir of translating from Polish into English the novels of Witold Gombrowicz, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. John Updike has described him as "A master of verbal burlesque, a connoisseur of psychological blackmail ... one of the profoundest of late moderns, with one of the lightest touches."The memoir covers about twenty years of my life, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s. It deals with the nitty-gritty of the craft, and art--because that's what it is--of a literary translation. I have been gratified, and somewhat surprised, that many of my friends and colleagues found the subject rather fascinating. Not so surprising was the interest in passages, close to titillating at times, concerning my relationship with my then husband Thom. As a native speaker of American English, Thom was a crucial contributor to my efforts. Also, the task of translating from a native tongue into an acquired language was an unusual process in those days.Let me draw here a simile between the first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"--and the process of translation, where many of the principles are alike, but every translator works in his or her own way, happy or not.One of these principles is not to translate literally. Unless I violated this rule whenever necessary, I could not have conveyed the strangeness of Gombrowicz's innovative prose in Polish into a strangeness in English and, to boot, to be rewarded for it.To follow up on the subtitle--how I came to translate the novels of this author--let me take a step back. As a Polish teenage refugee in London in the early 1940s, during the bombing by Germans with V1s and V2s, I learned English by immersion. This was sufficient to graduate from high school, from medical school and practice as a psychiatrist. However, it was not sufficient, when I caught the bug, in my fifties, for writing literary prose. It required a lot of practice. Without this, when I later caught the bug to translate Gombrowicz, I could not have adequately rendered his beautiful prose into English.To relay the life behind Gombrowicz's works called for synchrony between the author's way of thinking and writing, and my own. Contrariness of mind, quirkiness in expressing it. My own literary writing, learned with the sweat of my brow, provided a good and necessary preparation.In summary, I hope to convey in my memoir the excitement of translating extraordinarily difficult texts, and the excitement, often painful, of my life with the man to whom I owe gratitude for assistance in this stupendous endeavor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1521040419
• ISBN13: 9781521040416
• Release Date: April 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"