Polish title: Wędrówki po Argentynie
“The great truth that the foreigner reveals to us about ourselves is that we are stitched and woven with ARTIFICE!”
Argentinian Peregrinations (Wędrówki po Argentynie) was found by Gombrowicz’s wife Rita in the writers’ posthumous papers in 1976.
These were the first texts which Witold Gombrowicz wrote for the Polish wing of Radio Free Europe, from the beginning of 1959 through October of the same year.
Witold Gombrowicz wrote twenty-six chronicles of four typewritten pages each. Each chronicle has its own title, and each was to correspond to a fifteen-minute radio program. Gombrowicz himself gave the ensemble of texts the title Argentinian Peregrinations.
Despite extensive research undertaken in the Polish archives of Radio Free Europe, there is no trace of any recording or broadcast of these chronicles.
Found in the same lot of texts written for Radio Free Europe were Polish Memories, as well as the articles “The Mug and the Face” (Gęba i twarz) and “The Radio Discussion That Never Happened” (Dyskusja radiowa która nie doszła do skutku).
Argentinian Peregrinations, Polish Memories and the two aforementioned articles were first published in a single volume by Kultura’s Literary Institute in Paris in 1977.
Since 1996, Argentinian Peregrinations has been published by Wydawnictwo Literackie of Kraków. Argentinian Peregrinations was published in Paris, in a French translation by Allan Kosko, by Éditions Christian Bourgois in 1984.
