Cosmos
By Witold Gombrowicz; Danuta Borchardt (Translator)
(Yale University Press, Hardcover, 9780300108484, 208pp.)
Publication Date: October 2005
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: General
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A dark, quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man’s attempt to bring order out of chaos in his psychological life.
Published in 1965, Cosmos is the last novel by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and his most somber and multifaceted work. Two young men meet by chance in a Polish resort town in the Carpathian Mountains. Intending to spend their vacation relaxing, they find a secluded family-run pension. But the two become embroiled first in a macabre event on the way to the pension, then in the peculiar activities and psychological travails of the family running it. Gombrowicz offers no solution to their predicament.
Cosmos is translated here for the first time directly from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt, translator of Ferdydurke.
Witold Gombrowicz wrote three other novels, Trans-Atlantyk, Pornografia, and Ferdydurke, which, together with his plays and his three-volume Diary, have been translated into more than thirty languages.
“Borchardt’s graceful, powerful, and inventive translation is a great gift to all lovers of Witold Gombrowicz’s quirky prose.”—Jaroslaw Anders
-Jaroslaw Anders
Praise for Ferdydurke:
“This promises to be, at last, the English translation of Ferdydurke that we have all been waiting for.”—Stanislaw Baranczak, Harvard University
-Stanislaw Baranczak
Praise for Ferdydurke:
“Extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny, wonderful. . . . Long live its sublime mockery.”—Susan Sontag
-Susan Sontag
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