ABSTRACT
Witold Gombrowicz was born and lived in Poland for the first half of his life but spent twenty-four years as an emigre in Argentina. This chapter traces a topography of Witold Gombrowicz's ambivalent reactions, flirtations with, and rejections of fascism, including his apparent fascination with the “wild youth” that throughout Europe highlights the militarism and barbarity of pre-World War II society. Regarding Gombrowicz as a transnational author means that a web of contact zones where the Polish, Argentinean, French, and German cultures meet as a result of his various border crossings has superseded the nation as the basic framework of analysis. Gombrowicz’s life and work crossed not only the West European-Central European border but also that between Europe and the Americas. Gombrowicz began working on the translation in Buenos Aires during the war, and it was published first in Spanish as El Casamiento in 1948 before appearing in Polish in 1953 as Slub.
