Volume 41, Number 16 · October 6, 1994
Too Polish for the Poles
By John Bayley
Trans-Atlantyk
by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Carolyn French, translated by Nina Karsov
Yale University Press, 122 pp., $20.00
One sometimes wonders nowadays if literature in English is not beginning to split up into component parts: English English novels, American English ones, Indian English, Caribbean, Californian, and so forth. Then along comes a novel like Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, which seems to appeal almost equally to the readers of the various 'Englishes,' and for the same sort of reasons. None the less, the fissiparous tendencies in modern English writing continue unchecked (do contemporary English and American novelists really have any idea of what the others are writing about?) and these tendencies are further complicated by other and more eccentric kinds of linguistic separatism. The new and in many ways admirable translation, into quite a new sort of English, of Witold Gombrowicz's fantasy novel Trans-Atlantyk shows us something of the fine detail of such recent fragmentation.
Review, 3753 words
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