From the Glouchester Daily Times: ‘Pornagrafia’ reading

Gloucester resident Danuta Borchardt, winner of the 2001 National Translation Award, read from her new translation of Polish author Witold Gombrowicz’s 1966 Pornografia: A Novel at The Bookstore of Gloucester on Thursday, November 19th.

Set on a Polish farm during World War II, the story is about two voyeuristic Warsaw intellectuals whose obsessive game becomes manipulating the love lives of two rural teenagers. Meanwhile, the Polish Resistance arrives to ferret out a traitor in the ranks.

Available for the first time in a translation taken directly from Gombrowicz’s original Polish, this is a novel of psychological gamesmanship and war-time revenge. Gombrowicz (1904-1969), who escaped from Poland to Buenos Aires at the onset of World War II, was the author of the novels “Ferdydurke,” “Trans-Atlantyk” and “Cosmos.” He is considered one of the masters of European Modernism, and is a major figure in Polish and Latin American literature.