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“Cosmos for me is black, primarily black, something like a black stream, turbulent, full of whirlpools, obstacles and flooded areas, carrying a mass of refuse, and in this stream a besotted man, at the mercy of the waters, trying to decipher and to understand so that he can assemble what he sees into some whole.”
—A Kind of Testament: Interviews with Dominique de Roux [Trans. Hamilton] |
“Agglomeration, whirl and welter ... too much, too much, too much, crowding, movement, heaping, crashing, pushing, a general hurly-burly, huge mastodons filling space that, in the blinking of an eye, would break up into thousands of details, combinations, masses of rock, brawls, in a clumsy chaos, and suddenly all those details would again collect into an overpowering shape!”
“The panoramas persisted for a while, then something new emerged, pressing on, it was so naked, or entangled, or glittering, at times heroic, there were precipices, indurations, crevices, variations of hanging rocks, then, pastoral scenes, for example, in ascending, descending rhythms composed of bushes, trees, wounds, lesions, and subsidences, floated in, sweet at times, at times lacey.”
[From the novel, trans. Borchardt]
There is no other explanation for “berg”, the keyword of Cosmos, to be found—other than what Witold Gombrowicz alludes to in the novel itself:
“Berg! Ah, yes, you were saying earlier that two Jews ... a Jewish joke. Not a joke at all! Berg! Berging with a berg into a berg, mind you—blumberging with a berg ... Ti, ri, ri!”
Is “berg” an allusion to Yiddish ? (בערגל/bergl, "hill")
Is it the German word “Berg” (mountain)—because the action takes place in Zakopane, in the Tatras mountains?