Ferdydurke

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**Title** **Ferdydurke**
Author	Witold Gombrowicz
Original title	Ferdydurke
Translator	Danuta Borchardt
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Harcourt, Brace & World
Released	1961 (1st US edition), 2000 (revised US edition)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	272 p. (hardback edition)
ISBN	NA

Ferdydurke is a novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, published in 1937.

Considered a masterpiece of European modernism, Ferdydurke was published at an inopportune moment. World War II, Russia's imposition of a communist regime in Poland and the author's decades of exile in Argentina nearly erased public awareness of a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity and cultural and political mores. In this darkly humorous story, Joey Kowalski describes his transformation from a 30-year-old man into a teenage boy. Kowalski's exploits are comic and erotic -- for this is a modernism closer to Dada and the Marx brothers than to the elevated tones of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound -- but also carry a subtle undertone of philosophical seriousness.

Gombrowicz is interested in identity and the way time and circumstance, history and place impose form on people's lives. The book itself is a parody of common literary forms in prewar Polish literature - an introspective, almost Proustian monologue transitions into a schoolboy memoir, then abruptly becomes a story of intergenerational struggle before finishing up as a "socially conscious" tale of life in a country manor. At each transition point there is a general brawl, a moment of escape, followed by a descent back into rigid form. Gombrowicz weaves into the book his theme that immaturity is the force behind our creative endeavors, but he's also clear that there's no getting away from this relentless, normalizing force.

Gombrowicz himself wrote of his novel that it is not "... a satire on some social class, nor a nihilistic attack on culture... We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life's pressure... The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystalized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate -- this is the chief excitement of my book."

As much as anything, the book is a rich celebration of language, full of neologisms, pastiche and linguistic playfulness. This makes it difficult to translate, and anglophone readers have not been helped by the fact that early translations of the text were indirect, done from the French.

Danuta Borchardt has completed a direct translation of the novel, published in 2000, that deftly captures Gombrowicz's idiosyncratic style, allowing English speakers to fully experience the text.