Translating oneself: Gombrowicz’s diaries

Abstract

In taking as its starting point the vision of the diary making as a laboratory of subjectivity, the paper investigates the specific ambivalences of this form of personal writing. While hesitating between the affirmation of intimacy and the seeking for interlocution, the diaries elaborated by the emigrant writer Witold Gombrowicz become a curious realm of staging of an “I” as a victim of monstrous deformations. In fact, reader of existentialists as well as of Joseph Conrad, Gombrowicz stages in his writing the search for the singular self in the context of the domination of various alienations. The critical exploration and the auto critical movement are due to violent unfoldings of the “I”. The exile, the extraterritoriality and the resistance to the false comfort promoted by the ideological discourses bring the space of Gombrowicz’s diaries close to the search for the romanticism of neutrality articulated in the texts by Conrad.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.29562