Witold Gombrowicz, Vence, photo: Bohdan Paczowski
The facsimile edition of the writer's final work is released on the 24th of October in Kraków by Wydawnictwo Literackie (WL). The following day, the handwritten Kronos manuscript is deposited with the National Library – with translation rights already secured for Germany, China and the Czech Republic.
The book life of Kronos takes its latest step after its contentious publication by WL in May 2013. The facsimile edition displays the complete original version, maintained in a file from around 1953 until Witold Gombrowicz's death in 1969, years he spent publishing works including his acclaimed Diary and the novels Pornografia and Cosmos. The brittle pages will be displayed at the WL offices, 1 Długa Street, on the 24th from 20:00 to midnight (along with prized manuscripts including work by Stanisław Lem), coinciding with the annual Conrad Festival and the Kraków Book Fair.
Differing viewpoints on the publication of Kronos will be aired at Pod Baranami Palace the same evening at 18:00, with the Gombrowicz expert Janusz Margański moderating a discussion with writers including Jerzy Franczak and Michał Paweł Markowski who've taken positions in the Polish press, and with Rita Gombrowicz in attendance. (For her Culture.pl interview about Kronos, click here.) And on Friday the 25th at noon, the manuscript will be transfered to the National Library – the first of the author's manuscripts deposited there. It was the decision of Rita Gombrowicz that Kronos remain in Poland (the writer's archives are in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, along with those of the poets Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Wat).
The manuscript had spent decades in her care, as Gombrowicz's literary executor, while the writer's finished works gained fame. In facsimile, it gives a new, graphic view of his life – a closely scripted accounting and vivid physical trace of an author who remains conspicuously lacking in a full biography. The new edition provides evidence of that life that the book version could not, and recalls special editions of writers' notes by Thomas Mann and Andre Breton. Early years are scrawled on the back of the letterhead of his employer, the Banco Polaco in Buenos Aires, then on sheets with edges taped for preservation – emphasizing the efforts of plumbing back into his life, a complusion that had assumed the added urgency of exile, as Gombrowicz chose to remain in Argentina in 1939, where he'd arrived on a cruise as a journalist when Poland was invaded and the Second World War erupted.
Columns are constructed on pages for the late 1940s, utilized as he organized experiences he recalled from those years; circles in the margins become shorthand for sex encounters; doodles and filigreed script enliven the penmanship. A transcription in Polish occupies each facing page to some 70 original sheets, and extensive footnotes - widely praised in reviews of the book's publication in spring, for making the volume accessible - fill some two dozen pages at the end of the new edition. Also at the back is a section of Tableaux, additional pages from the Kronos file.
That section includes a page, in reverse chronology, that has the word BANK both at the start (1948) and finish (1955) of his tenure at Banco Polaco – the sole daily job he'd hold after clerking in the late 1920s in a Warsaw law office between the Royal Castle in and the Vistula River's left bank. In his monthly synopses in 1955, near the bottom, a tiny hole that might have been burned through by the cigarette ash of a man whose widow says he'd start a day with multiple packs and one match.
The debut publication of Kronos had come in May, after a secretive editorial process of several years achieved significant surprise and widespread attention. Rumours had abounded about a mysterious work by Gombrowicz, but even people who have worked on the writer for decades, such as his top translator into German, Olaf Kuehl, now acknowledge how startling its existence was when it appeared. It became a publishing sensation in Poland, in part for provoking dispute – to some, a final unmasking by a masterful exposer of hypocrisy, while others felt the author's monthly accounting should have been left to researchers, not marketed to readers expecting another tough tale.
Lavishly illustrated with reproductions from the manuscript and archival photos, provided with clarity by its authoritative footnotes, Kronos spent weeks on top-seller racks in the bookshops, and discussed and disputed in the print media and on radio and TV. The varying viewpoints were summed up in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, where Krzysztof Varga opened in a mock Gombrowiczian tone:
Howso Kronos is not a big event, if it is a big event? Howso Kronos does not enchant, if it does enchant because it must enchant? The secret diary of Gombrowicz is a big event because Gombrowicz, a big writer, was, so Kronos the big book is.
In an e-mail exchange, the Wylie Agency, representatives of the writer's literary estate, confirmed that translation rights are contracted in China to the publisher Shanghai 99, and in the Czech Republic to Torst (though the Czech translator of Gombrowicz has reputedly said no to the job, another illustration of how people react to Kronos). Wylie also said that German rights have just been contracted with Hanser and that a French contract is being negotiated, adding that "significant interest" exists among publishers in other markets as they prepare to offer Kronos to their book-buying publics.
The agency specified that rights for the new work are contingent on the availability of Gombrowicz's major books in a given language - which makes for optimistic prospects in Norway, for example, where the Diary is now appearing in its most complete edition to date. And in the U.S., where Yale University Press published the first single-volume edition of the Diary in 2012 in English, and where the brief, harshly comic novel Trans-Atlantyk comes out in spring 2014 in the nimble new translation by Danuta Borchardt.
Translation of Krzysztof Varga: Klementyna Suchanow
21.10.2013