Poetry review – THE APOTHEOSIS OF MUSIC: Daniel Barbiero reviews a new translation of poems by Witold Wirpsza and considers the effect of history on the poet’s work
The Apotheosis of Music
Witold Wirpsza, tr. Frank L. Vigoda
World Poetry Books, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-31-4
pp 144 $20
Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses famously described history as a nightmare from which he’s trying to awaken. Joyce’s image is provocative. The idea that history is a nightmare suggests that it’s a kind of anti-dream – a dream stripped of the defenses that dreams purportedly set up to guard against the aggressive or destructive impulses they contain. History doesn’t repress or disguise those impulses but rather is the record of their overt and explicit enactment—their realization, in real time.
Polish poet Witold Wirpsza (1918-1985) lived at a time and in a place that saw some of the worst of the last century’s historical nightmare. He was born in Odessa to a Greek mother and Polish father during the savage Russian Civil War; the family then moved to what was at the time the League of Nations administered Free City of Danzig, (now Gdansk in Poland). He was drafted into the Polish Army and fought against the invading German Army in the Battle of K?pa Oksywska in September, 1939, and was taken prisoner following the Polish defeat. He was freed during the Red Army’s 1945 offensive and as a soldier in the Polish People’s Army fought alongside the Soviets during the brutal battles for Berlin. After the war he settled in Kraków and eventually in Szczecin. Under the Soviet-aligned Communist regime he joined the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party and held official positions in provincial cultural, newspaper, and radio institutions and later, in Warsaw, worked for the state publishing house. Starting in the mid-1960s he went abroad on scholarships to West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Following the 1971 publication of his essay “Polaku, kim jeste??” (“Pole, Who Are You?”), whose questions concerning nationalism upset the regime, he was banned from publishing in Poland. Consequently he opted to settle permanently in West Berlin, where he spent the rest of his life. He continued to write poetry, and with his wife Maria Kurecka translated a number of German works into Polish. By the time he died in 1985, Wirpsza had experienced wars, captivity, occupation, censorship, and exile.
Wirpsza’s first published poetry appeared in 1935, when he was just seventeen years old. In the immediate postwar period he published several volumes of poetry in the Socialist Realist style; after leaving Poland permanently he continued writing poems, some of which were circulated clandestinely in his home country. The Apotheosis of Music contains a selection of these poems spanning the period from the 1940s to 1985. The bilingual edition, which represents the first collection of Wirpsza’s poetry in English, was translated by “Frank J. Vigoda”—the pseudonym for the husband-and-wife team of Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel.
For the most part, the tragic events Wirpsza lived through enter his poetry obliquely. “Fireworks,” a 1984 poem about the temporary nature of maps, seems to allude to the drawing and redrawing of national borders that plagued Eastern Europe before, during, and after the war. For Wirpsza, these cartographic “works of art” become “more/ And more impressive” as they become obsolete over time; they are in effect fictions fixing on paper the momentary results of history’s “continuous fireworks.”
In “Hardships,” also from 1984, Wirpsza directly addresses the ravages of the preceding decades as they touched, or nearly touched, him:
Not my hardships, but the ones that missed me,
Yet they did not miss others, and I saw that.
I was not led to the gas chamber,
Yet I know it was hard for others to step in.
I might have been there, but it missed me,
I saw photos and it was not hard to look at them.
I was not carried to the east in cattle cars,
But I know others found it hard to survive there.
It missed me, but I read books about it,
And the books were not hard to find.
I was shelled, but the shells missed me,
And I did not find it hard to see others killed.
I was always a stone’s throw away from real horror—
Sometimes I was hungry, but I never starved.
I spent years behind barbed wire,
But it was merely barbed, not electric…
A stone’s throw, a step, a hair, a breath away from bearing witness,
And I do it, not striving too hard for eloquence or style.
My heart was broken, but not completely and I still have the scar.
Perhaps this scar is a hardship for others, but not for me.
The hardships the speaker underwent are real, but as he admits, they were light compared to what others had to endure. Things may have been bad, he seems to say, but they could always have been worse. Much worse. In fact, the poem reads like a particularly dark “bad news-good news” joke. Wirpsza greets others’ hardships with an ironic recognition of the survivor’s good luck—“good luck” that scarred him, but perhaps because it spared him what others went through, in the end isn’t a hardship.
Quite often in these poems, Wirpsza pushes beyond irony and writes in a more barbed vein. “Dedication” is about a literal earworm, a parasite that enters a man’s brain and induces headaches “something like a wriggling burning rod” that “stimulated his imagination powerfully.” The thought-warping parasite is a kind of payback – it was put there by the man’s friend in revenge for the man’s trying to improve him. The poem closes with the dedication
To all who desire to improve mankind (such as pedagogues,
Especially those who tend to be overzealous in this matter).
To them I extend my humble thanks for the blessings bestowed on us.
“Dedication” is undated, but I read it as a post-exile poem whose sarcastic thanks is being directed toward the propagandizing ideologues of a regime that would hubristically attempt to perfect humankind. And in the process would suppress Wirpzsa’s writing, for good measure.
One of the books of poetry Wirpsza published before he fell out with the regime was 1962’s Comments on Photography, a response to the Family of Man photo exhibition curated by Edward Steichen. “Music” is Wirpsza’s ekphrasis of one of the photographs, a shot of five musicians playing chamber music in a living room. Wirpsza’s semi-surreal vignette imagines the five as members of a family, the score’s notes literally “nail[ing] themselves into their skulls,” the stems “tickling” their brains. Wirpsza, who before the war was a conservatory-trained concert pianist, knew music very well and knew that its seductive power is essentially amoral and not immune to abuse. Hence he concludes on this pointedly ambiguous note: “Music is among/ The most sublime—the most perfect—modes/ Of speech—forms of beauty–lies.”
The kind of tempered surrealism that appears in “Music” is found in a number of Wirpsza’s poems. That, along with his ironic attitude toward programs claiming—all too often, cynically—to uplift all humankind, was his way of trying to awaken us from the nightmare of history.
Nov 23 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Witold Wirpsza
Poetry review – THE APOTHEOSIS OF MUSIC: Daniel Barbiero reviews a new translation of poems by Witold Wirpsza and considers the effect of history on the poet’s work
Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses famously described history as a nightmare from which he’s trying to awaken. Joyce’s image is provocative. The idea that history is a nightmare suggests that it’s a kind of anti-dream – a dream stripped of the defenses that dreams purportedly set up to guard against the aggressive or destructive impulses they contain. History doesn’t repress or disguise those impulses but rather is the record of their overt and explicit enactment—their realization, in real time.
Polish poet Witold Wirpsza (1918-1985) lived at a time and in a place that saw some of the worst of the last century’s historical nightmare. He was born in Odessa to a Greek mother and Polish father during the savage Russian Civil War; the family then moved to what was at the time the League of Nations administered Free City of Danzig, (now Gdansk in Poland). He was drafted into the Polish Army and fought against the invading German Army in the Battle of K?pa Oksywska in September, 1939, and was taken prisoner following the Polish defeat. He was freed during the Red Army’s 1945 offensive and as a soldier in the Polish People’s Army fought alongside the Soviets during the brutal battles for Berlin. After the war he settled in Kraków and eventually in Szczecin. Under the Soviet-aligned Communist regime he joined the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party and held official positions in provincial cultural, newspaper, and radio institutions and later, in Warsaw, worked for the state publishing house. Starting in the mid-1960s he went abroad on scholarships to West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Following the 1971 publication of his essay “Polaku, kim jeste??” (“Pole, Who Are You?”), whose questions concerning nationalism upset the regime, he was banned from publishing in Poland. Consequently he opted to settle permanently in West Berlin, where he spent the rest of his life. He continued to write poetry, and with his wife Maria Kurecka translated a number of German works into Polish. By the time he died in 1985, Wirpsza had experienced wars, captivity, occupation, censorship, and exile.
Wirpsza’s first published poetry appeared in 1935, when he was just seventeen years old. In the immediate postwar period he published several volumes of poetry in the Socialist Realist style; after leaving Poland permanently he continued writing poems, some of which were circulated clandestinely in his home country. The Apotheosis of Music contains a selection of these poems spanning the period from the 1940s to 1985. The bilingual edition, which represents the first collection of Wirpsza’s poetry in English, was translated by “Frank J. Vigoda”—the pseudonym for the husband-and-wife team of Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel.
For the most part, the tragic events Wirpsza lived through enter his poetry obliquely. “Fireworks,” a 1984 poem about the temporary nature of maps, seems to allude to the drawing and redrawing of national borders that plagued Eastern Europe before, during, and after the war. For Wirpsza, these cartographic “works of art” become “more/ And more impressive” as they become obsolete over time; they are in effect fictions fixing on paper the momentary results of history’s “continuous fireworks.”
In “Hardships,” also from 1984, Wirpsza directly addresses the ravages of the preceding decades as they touched, or nearly touched, him:
The hardships the speaker underwent are real, but as he admits, they were light compared to what others had to endure. Things may have been bad, he seems to say, but they could always have been worse. Much worse. In fact, the poem reads like a particularly dark “bad news-good news” joke. Wirpsza greets others’ hardships with an ironic recognition of the survivor’s good luck—“good luck” that scarred him, but perhaps because it spared him what others went through, in the end isn’t a hardship.
Quite often in these poems, Wirpsza pushes beyond irony and writes in a more barbed vein. “Dedication” is about a literal earworm, a parasite that enters a man’s brain and induces headaches “something like a wriggling burning rod” that “stimulated his imagination powerfully.” The thought-warping parasite is a kind of payback – it was put there by the man’s friend in revenge for the man’s trying to improve him. The poem closes with the dedication
“Dedication” is undated, but I read it as a post-exile poem whose sarcastic thanks is being directed toward the propagandizing ideologues of a regime that would hubristically attempt to perfect humankind. And in the process would suppress Wirpzsa’s writing, for good measure.
One of the books of poetry Wirpsza published before he fell out with the regime was 1962’s Comments on Photography, a response to the Family of Man photo exhibition curated by Edward Steichen. “Music” is Wirpsza’s ekphrasis of one of the photographs, a shot of five musicians playing chamber music in a living room. Wirpsza’s semi-surreal vignette imagines the five as members of a family, the score’s notes literally “nail[ing] themselves into their skulls,” the stems “tickling” their brains. Wirpsza, who before the war was a conservatory-trained concert pianist, knew music very well and knew that its seductive power is essentially amoral and not immune to abuse. Hence he concludes on this pointedly ambiguous note: “Music is among/ The most sublime—the most perfect—modes/ Of speech—forms of beauty–lies.”
The kind of tempered surrealism that appears in “Music” is found in a number of Wirpsza’s poems. That, along with his ironic attitude toward programs claiming—all too often, cynically—to uplift all humankind, was his way of trying to awaken us from the nightmare of history.