Gombrowicz used the nonsensical and the absurd as weapons against convention. Illustration by Victor Melamed

In the summer of 1939, the writer Witold Gombrowicz set sail from Poland, on the ocean liner Chrobry, on what he thought would be a brief mission as a cultural ambassador to the Polish community in Argentina. He was not an obvious candidate for the job, having made his name as an eccentric irritant to the literary establishment. He was the author of a wildly surrealist collection of short stories; a dreamlike play, “Ivona, Princess of Burgundia,” which remained unperformed for decades after it was written; and a novel, “Ferdydurke,” which is now recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, but was dismissed by establishment critics at the time as “the ravings of a madman.”

A week after the Chrobry docked in Buenos Aires, Germany invaded Poland. The temporary emissary, who spoke no Spanish and had few local contacts, had little choice but to stay where he was. His exile lasted for more than two decades. Back home, his books were banned by the Nazis, and then, after 1945, by the Stalinists. In the rest of the world, they were merely unknown.

By 1952, when he pitched to Kultura, a prestigious Polish literary journal based in Paris, the idea of writing a diary for publication, Gombrowicz was demoralized and desperate. He had been living in isolation and obscurity for thirteen years. For a while he had worked at a bank, where the director gave him permission to write during business hours, but this cozy arrangement did not last long. The translation of “Ferdydurke” into Spanish, financed by a wealthy friend, had been ignored. Another novel, “Trans-Atlantic,” received plenty of attention in the Polish émigré community but did little to bolster Gombrowicz’s international reputation. Written in a hybridized, deliberately antiquated style rich with puns and double-entendres, the book was all but untranslatable. (An English version, ten years in the making, did not appear until 1994.) He needed to reinvent himself. “I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes,” he wrote to Kultura’s editor.

Under the heading “Fragments of a Diary,” the magazine published Gombrowicz’s provocative, idiosyncratic, highly personal musings from 1953 until his death, in 1969. In entries ranging from a few sentences to multiple pages, Gombrowicz recorded his daily routine, his diet, and his to-do lists; his reading, his travels, and his moods. He reproduced cantankerous letters to the editors of various publications; he fulminated against Communism, existentialism, and even democracy; he deployed elegant quips and humorous aphorisms. Most of all, he wrote about literature: he described in detail his writing process, explicated his own works, and railed against the deplorable state of the literary scene in Poland, in the émigré community, and virtually everywhere else. “People!” he exclaimed after reading a particularly obtuse critic on his work. “Cut my throat if you are told to, but not with such a dull, such a terribly dull, knife!” An immediate hit among Kultura’s readers, the diary was collected in three volumes by the magazine’s book division, but it was not legally sold in Poland until after his death, and even then only in censored form.

Now, for the first time, the complete “Diary” has been published in English, by Yale, in a heroic translation, by Lillian Vallee, that totals more than seven hundred pages. (Vallee’s versions of the three volumes appeared piecemeal between 1988 and 1993, but they have long been out of print.) English-speaking readers can finally experience the diary as Gombrowicz intended it—as a single, coherent work. On the face of it, Gombrowicz sought in the diary to revive Polish culture from the near-fatal blows dealt to it over the twentieth century. But he was equally concerned with saving himself.

The class of noble gentry into which Gombrowicz was born subscribed to a vision of Polishness that could be traced back at least to Boleslaw I Chrobry (“the Brave”), the ocean liner’s namesake and the first king of a unified Polish nation, at the turn of the first millennium. The family owned multiple estates, and his mother once served as president of the Society of Landed Ladies. But by 1904, when Gombrowicz was born, this class was on the verge of dying out; Polish independence, in 1918, and later occupations by the Nazis and the Soviets finished it off. In the diary, Gombrowicz describes himself as both “terribly Polish and terribly rebellious against Poland.” The once venerated traditional customs—honor, ceremoniousness, even duelling—struck him as hopelessly insincere. In response, he offered the absurd: if his mother said it was raining, he would claim the sun was shining. “This early training in evident falsehood and open preposterousness proved immensely useful in later years when I began to write,” he said later.

Through provocation, Gombrowicz believed, he could find his way to a more authentic form of life—surreal, perhaps, but more akin to reality than the privileged sphere of the aristocracy. “Within me a rebelliousness was growing that I could neither comprehend nor control,” he wrote in a collection of autobiographical sketches, published posthumously as “Polish Memories.” He openly mocked his high-school teachers; at a funeral, uncontrollable laughter seized him by the graveside. “If I learned anything at all in school, it was more likely to be in the breaks, from my schoolmates as they beat me up,” he recalled. “Other than that, I educated myself by reading books, especially those that were forbidden, and by doing nothing—for the freely wandering mind of the loafer is that which best develops the intelligence.” After a desultory attempt at law school—he later claimed that he sent his valet to the lectures as his proxy—he passed the final exam only by chance.

Recurrent bouts of ill health often forced him to the countryside. There, solitary and bored, he began to sketch out a novel. Everyone he showed it to told him it was awful. But he enjoyed the “strange, toxic work” of writing fiction. Gombrowicz puzzled over the symbolism of his dreams, believing that they offered a way to break out of “the whole Polish farce.” His first stories were published in 1933, as the collection “Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity”—later renamed “Bacacay,” after the street he lived on in Buenos Aires. (Gombrowicz’s titles are consistently random: he once explained that he named his books “for the same reason that a person names his dogs—to distinguish them from others.”)

Grotesque, erotic, and often hilarious, the stories immediately established Gombrowicz’s extraordinary voice. A man encounters another man by chance at the opera and shadows him for weeks—sending him flowers, writing letters to his mistress—unaware of the torment his attentions are causing. A visitor to a country estate where the head of the household has just died becomes convinced, for no logical reason, that the man was murdered by a member of his family. A countess famous for her meatless dinners may, it turns out, be serving human flesh. “From the beginning the nonsensical and the absurd were very much to my liking, and I was never more satisfied than when my pen gave birth to some scene that was truly crazy, removed from the (healthy) expectations of mediocre logic, and yet firmly rooted in its own separate logic,” he wrote in “Polish Memories.” As creepy as Poe and as absurdist as Kafka, the stories earned the admiration of Bruno Schulz—an admiration that was not initially reciprocated. But the critics took the title literally, deploring the author’s juvenility. Their disapproval spurred Gombrowicz to greater outrage.