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Originally from “Imp of the Perverse” by Ruth Franklin, New Yorker. Original article here.

In the summer of 1939, the writer Witold Gombrowicz set sail from Poland, on the ocean liner Chrobry, on what he thought would be a brief mission as a cultural ambassador to the Polish community in Argentina. He was not an obvious candidate for the job, having made his name as an eccentric irritant to the literary establishment. He was the author of a wildly surrealist collection of short stories; a dreamlike play, “Ivona, Princess of Burgundia,” which remained unperformed for decades after it was written; and a novel, “Ferdydurke,” which is now recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, but was dismissed by establishment critics at the time as “the ravings of a madman.”

A week after the Chrobry docked in Buenos Aires, Germany invaded Poland. The temporary emissary, who spoke no Spanish and had few local contacts, had little choice but to stay where he was. His exile lasted for more than two decades. Back home, his books were banned by the Nazis, and then, after 1945, by the Stalinists. In the rest of the world, they were merely unknown.

By 1952, when he pitched to Kultura, a prestigious Polish literary journal based in Paris, the idea of writing a diary for publication, Gombrowicz was demoralized and desperate. He had been living in isolation and obscurity for thirteen years. For a while he had worked at a bank, where the director gave him permission to write during business hours, but this cozy arrangement did not last long. The translation of “Ferdydurke” into Spanish, financed by a wealthy friend, had been ignored. Another novel, “Trans-Atlantic,” received plenty of attention in the Polish émigré community but did little to bolster Gombrowicz’s international reputation. Written in a hybridized, deliberately antiquated style rich with puns and double-entendres, the book was all but untranslatable. (An English version, ten years in the making, did not appear until 1994.) He needed to reinvent himself. “I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes,” he wrote to Kultura’s editor.

Under the heading “Fragments of a Diary,” the magazine published Gombrowicz’s provocative, idiosyncratic, highly personal musings from 1953 until his death, in 1969. In entries ranging from a few sentences to multiple pages, Gombrowicz recorded his daily routine, his diet, and his to-do lists; his reading, his travels, and his moods. He reproduced cantankerous letters to the editors of various publications; he fulminated against Communism, existentialism, and even democracy; he deployed elegant quips and humorous aphorisms. Most of all, he wrote about literature: he described in detail his writing process, explicated his own works, and railed against the deplorable state of the literary scene in Poland, in the émigré community, and virtually everywhere else. “People!” he exclaimed after reading a particularly obtuse critic on his work. “Cut my throat if you are told to, but not with such a dull, such a terribly dull, knife!” An immediate hit among Kultura’s readers, the diary was collected in three volumes by the magazine’s book division, but it was not legally sold in Poland until after his death, and even then only in censored form.

Now, for the first time, the complete “Diary” has been published in English, by Yale, in a heroic translation, by Lillian Vallee, that totals more than seven hundred pages. (Vallee’s versions of the three volumes appeared piecemeal between 1988 and 1993, but they have long been out of print.) English-speaking readers can finally experience the diary as Gombrowicz intended it—as a single, coherent work. On the face of it, Gombrowicz sought in the diary to revive Polish culture from the near-fatal blows dealt to it over the twentieth century. But he was equally concerned with saving himself.