The volume Gombrowicz in Transnational Context, edited by Silvia G. Dapía, is one of the most valuable pieces of scholarly work on Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) published in recent years. Gombrowicz was a novelist, philosopher, dramaturge, and author of short stories as well as of the monumental Diary (1953–1969). His experimental works are masterpieces of post-war literature and the Theater of the Absurd.

Dapía's book partially consists of carefully selected reprints, translations, and extended versions of articles that have been published in various books and periodicals in recent years. All of them are highly informative and indeed deserve to be reprinted and translated from Polish, Spanish, and French. As applying for reprint permission is one of the most unappreciated tasks while preparing an edited volume, this aspect of Dapía's work should be highlighted.

The first section of the volume, Lost in Translation, mostly constitutes case studies. As Gombrowicz had mastered his own literary style that combined—among others—the vocabulary of the pre-war press, the language mannerisms of the Polish gentry (szlachta), and the slang of the lower classes (peasantry and domestic servants), many elements of his literary realm remain virtually untranslatable. This is particularly the case for the experimental novel Ferdydurke (1937), whose Spanish and English translations are the topics of the two articles written by Danel Balderston and Magdalena Heydel, respectively. Olaf Kühl, the German translator of Gombrowicz's Diary, selects and investigates ambiguous notions of Gombrowicz's prose, such as “fact” (fakt), “darkness” (ciemność), and various forms of “to be,” and “to exist” in Polish (był, jestem, przebywałem).

The “translation” of Gombrowicz's works concerns not solely the language. Gombrowicz, who lived for almost a quarter of a century in Buenos Aires, can be read together with such authors as Ricardo Piglia or Juan José Saer, as contemporary Argentina—its culture, its traumata, its daily life—remains one of the main topics of Gombrowicz's works, especially the novel Trans-Atlantyk and the Diary. As Carlos Gamerro, one of the contributors to Gombrowicz in Transnational Context, points out, Trans-Atlantyk was “[t]he first novel in Argentine literature to succumb to the fascination of the semantic and phonic aspects of the word puto” (41). In sum, the link between “transnationality” and “translation” proposed in the first section of Dapía's volume allows the reader to realize to what extent Gombrowicz was both a Polish and an Argentinian author.

The second part of the book, Cartography of Affect in Gombrowicz's Works, could be divided into two subsections: modernist and postmodernist. Michał P. Markowski explores the existentialist motive of boredom and its philosophical dimensions and compares Gombrowicz's conception of boredom with two other great Polish modernist and avant-gardist writers, Bruno Schulz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Piotr S. Rosół and Tul'si (Tuesday) Bhambry consider modernist questions and investigate, respectively, the notion of subjectivity in Gombrowicz's prose (as well as its derivations, such as “trans-subjectivity” and “otherness”), and the issue of solitude and silence, understood both as a literary motive in Trans-Atlantyk and as a personal experience of living in a foreign country that is often meant to ultimately form the writer's authenticity (which is why Bhambry focuses on Gombrowicz's critique of Emil Cioran's essay Avantages de l'exil). Błażej Warkocki and Daniel Pratt, on the other hand, propose a more postmodernist way of reading Gombrowicz. The former analyzes Gombrowicz's short story Zdarzenia na brygu Banbury (The Events on the Banbury) in light of queer theory. As he stresses, the eponymous Banbury ship “is a ship of normalsów (straight) where we find an increasingly frightened queer. Frightened to the brink of paranoia, which exposes the mechanisms of homophobia” (136). Pratt follows the way established by Michael Goddard and Hanjo Berressem and compares the Deleuzian concept of “affect” with Gombrowicz's notions of “Form” and “youth,” focusing on the novels Pornography and Trans-Atlantyk. Finally, Silvia G. Dapía's case study investigates the short story Zbrodnia z premedytacją (A Premeditated Crime) and brilliantly shows to what extent the focus on embodiment and “circulation of affect and its crystallizations as emotions” (173) requires the reconsideration of the key theoretical concepts of Gombrowicz, including the notion of “Form.”

The last part of the book, The Political Gombrowicz, allows the reader to reconsider Gombrowicz's works in historical contexts. Jerzy Jarzębski analyzes the novel Ferdydurke (1937), The Possessed (1939), as well as the juvenile short stories and determines that despite their abstract, experimental forms they contain clear references to the rising fascism in Europe. References to fascism in Gombrowicz's prose are also a starting point for the article by Andrzej S. Kowalczyk. His text, however, is devoted to the parts of Diary that concern Gombrowicz's one-year stay in Western Berlin that were very quickly translated into German and published simply as Berliner Notizen (The Berlin Notes, 1965). Gombrowicz witnessed in Berlin the last moments of the post-war latency, the time when the recent Nazi past was still a taboo in Germany. Allen J. Kuharski and Klementyna Suchanow, on the other hand, describe in their articles “how Gombrowicz became Gombrowicz,” that is, how the broader reception of his works changed over time. The former reconstructs the circumstances of staging Gombrowicz's dramas in Poland under communist rule and after 1989 (it is a pity that Michał Dobrzyński's musical adaptation of Operetta from 2015 was not mentioned here); the latter describes the tough path that an experimental, unknown Polish author from South America had to follow to finally find a publisher in France.

In sum, Gombrowicz in Transnational Context truly contributes not only to contemporary “gombrowiczology,” but also to translation and translator studies and the reflection on the “affective turn” in the humanities—and thus is worthy of broader attention.