{"id":12914,"date":"2025-06-14T18:51:51","date_gmt":"2025-06-14T17:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12914"},"modified":"2025-06-14T18:51:51","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T17:51:51","slug":"witold-wirpsza-apotheosis-of-music-reviewed-by-dylan-stewart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12914","title":{"rendered":"Witold Wirpsza, Apotheosis of Music, reviewed by Dylan Stewart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Wipsza\u2019s dream-like poems are absurd, but if you pay attention to the material from which these dreams are made, you\u2019ll find them lingering with you in unexpected ways.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/1739027776-600-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"467\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Witold Wirpsza | <em>Apotheosis of Music<\/em> | translated by Frank L. Vigoda | World Poetry <\/strong><strong>Books: \u00a318.99<br \/>Reviewed by Dylan Stewart<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/><\/strong>Witold Wirpsza was a Polish poet who lived from 1918 to 1985. He was born in Odessa, in<br \/>Ukraine, at the time caught up in the Russian Civil War and died in West Berlin. These facts alone tell a story. He was born amid a conflict over imperialism, totalising ideology, and the struggle for nationhood. He died an exile from his home country, unable to return. Apotheosis of Music is the first collection of his poetry translated into the English language, in it, all of the above facts are present just below the page. However, also present is a voice which is often sinuous and challenging but is also playful and human.<\/p>\n<p>But maybe to talk about Wirpsza\u2019s voice in the singular gets us off on the wrong foot, in<br \/>Wirpsza we find a variety of voices and a variety of different modes of doing poetry. At<br \/>times, the poems are dream-like and absurd, filled with a wide variety of potent images from dancing dwarves to Damascus steel; yet, at others his poems have complete focus on a singular point, often political or philosophical. However, to treat these modes as completely separate would be a mistake; the dream-like poems are absurd, but if you pay attention to the material from which these dreams are made, you\u2019ll find that they are not random. For instance, \u2018Stalin at the crossroads\u2019, the second part of \u2018Apotheosis of Dance\u2019, takes place in medieval Europe and follows Joseph, a man taken as a slave by the Saracens and forced to produce Damascus steel. He becomes obsessed with the steel and takes a new name from it, \u2018Stalin\u2019. Once he\u2019s a free man once again, he wanders Southern England as a sentimental poet until he is confronted with what appear to be a pack of wolves at a crossroads. He murders them. In the morning, it is discovered that a number of women have been decapitated at the crossroads. Stalin is never seen again.<\/p>\n<p>This story is not complete nonsense, there is a unity to its symbols, and it seems to be saying something of contemporary relevance. However, it is also not a straightforward analogy or parody of the violence and oppression of Stalin\u2019s regime. I think it is best to read these poems as reactions to, refractions of, the material which made up Wirpsza\u2019s thoughts. Wirpsza lived through an unstable and tragic time \u2013 that he transformed that tragedy into an act of imagination, something enjoyable, a fairy tale, shows his strength of character, his irrepressible individuality, to take hold of the people and the violence that have subjugated so many and make it the subject of your own free creation. There\u2019s something admirable, inspirational about Wirpsza\u2019s dreams.<\/p>\n<p>Wirpsza is self-aware of his place as a single individual trying to preserve himself in the face of unwelcome intervention. In the more focused poems that I mentioned earlier, individuality is often a major theme. In one poem, Wirpsza tells the tale of a man embedding a white worm in his friend\u2019s head, causing migraines and constant paranoia even after the worm has passed. He does this as punishment for trying to improve the moral character of his friend, embedding in his head the idea that he isn\u2019t yet good enough. In another poem, Wirpsza speaks about the transformations, both bodily and of the mind, that he will be made to go through by pedagogues, in order to become \u2018highly talented\u2019 and to \u2018match society\u2019s happiness\u2019. He says this all with a forced smile, barely hiding his fear and hatred. There is something in Wirpsza\u2019s dark but shining imagination, his cynical humanism, that reminds me of Dostoyevsky, a man who also knew that man\u2019s final desire, even once everything else is fulfilled, is to disobey.<\/p>\n<p>However, Wirpsza\u2019s love of disobedience isn\u2019t an anti-intellectualism. The variety of<br \/>references in his poetry show him to be a well read, intellectually engaged man. He has a love of music and a love of the individual artist, both of which feature in his poetry. As well as Stalin, in \u2018Apotheosis of Dance, we find Plato, Beethoven and Dante, all transformed in<br \/>outlandish ways. A number of poems focus on the effect that listening to and playing music<br \/>has on the human being. In fact, in his poem \u2018Self Portrait\u2019 he seems to make the case that<br \/>poetry is more comparable to music than to painting or drawing. All of this comes together in my favourite poem of the collection, \u2018A Monologue by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart\u2019 in which Wirpsza takes up the voice of Mozart who reveals that he did not die in 1791 but in fact lived until at least 1844, when the monologue is given. Mozart recalls seeing his reputation change from that of a \u2018provincial musician\u2019 into a beloved genius. The image of an old Mozart, going blind and deaf, sitting on the stone steps outside a church, listening to his music that is no longer truly his, played to an audience who both loves and does not recognise him, has stuck with me. It shows Wirpsza\u2019s inventiveness, love of the individual, and understanding of the absurdity of life \u2013 all qualities that make this collection valuable.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Reviewed by Dylan Stewart<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wipsza\u2019s dream-like poems are absurd, but if you pay attention to the material from which these dreams are made, you\u2019ll find them lingering with you in unexpected ways. Witold Wirpsza | Apotheosis of Music | translated by Frank L. Vigoda | World Poetry Books: \u00a318.99Reviewed by Dylan Stewart Witold Wirpsza was a Polish poet who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Witold Wirpsza, Apotheosis of Music, reviewed by Dylan Stewart - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12914\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Witold Wirpsza, Apotheosis of Music, reviewed by Dylan Stewart - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Wipsza\u2019s dream-like poems are absurd, but if you pay attention to the material from which these dreams are made, you\u2019ll find them lingering with you in unexpected ways. 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