Reviews

The Burden of History: A Review of Batool Abu Akleen’s 48kg

September 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

48kg . . . does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war.

48kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, Palestine, Tenement Press, June 2025

Batool Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48kg, is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heart-breaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.

A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

Grief and Knowledge in a Dying World: A Review of Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini

September 11, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Stability and instability. Throughout Inn of the Survivors, the theme of balance comes up time and again—literally and metaphorically.

Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini, translated from the Italian by Rose Facchini, Snuggly Books, 2025

Inn of the Survivors is Italian writer Maico Morellini’s debut in the English language, a haunting and eerily familiar work from a sophisticated voice in speculative fiction, arriving in Rose Facchini’s translation. Set in a dystopian future after an unspecified climate disaster, the novella tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s arrival at the titular Inn of the Survivors, a haven on the Adriatic coast. Having taken off from her remote home in the mountains overlooking the Po River Valley, and following a three-year trek through Bologna, Forlì, and Cesena, she finally reaches the Inn and encounters others like her: people who have been on the run, trying to survive, living with trauma, grief, or shame. The price of staying? You must tell your story.

Lest you think my use of the second person is casual, it should be said that except for the backstory—which appears in the latter half—the novella is written entirely in the second person. While this narrative device appears often enough in English, it is far less common in Italian, with only two novels coming easily to mind: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and the most recent Strega Prize winner Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. This is likely due to the Italian third person impersonal (si + verb), which can mean anything from “you,” to the more formal-sounding “one,” to the most passive of voices. As such, choosing to write this tale in the second person was a bold and effective choice on the part of the author, with the new text sounding entirely natural (the ideal result for a work of cli-fi). Yet, thanks to specific geographic locations that are an integral part of the story and the protagonist’s desire to understand her country, it still retains a quality we can call “Italian.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

August 28, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

August 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Possibilities in Transformation: A Review of Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

August 20, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Garrett Biggs

[Ceilings] and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously. . .

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025

In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south . . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?

Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter. READ MORE…

To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

August 18, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

Transgressive, Phantasmagorical Banquet: A Review of The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka

August 13, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

. . . Luka's rendering moves beyond the Rilkean dream realm into a world of flesh and blood . . .

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka, translated from the Slovakian by James Sutherland-Smith, Seagull Books, 2025

The Minotaur’s Daughter, the English-language debut of Slovakian poet Eva Luka, unfurls a tapestry of phantasmagoria, animism, resistance, and transgression. Born in 1965 in the town of Trnava, Eva Lukáčová’s career in verse began with the collection Divosestra (Wildsister), published in 1999, which was followed by Diabloň (Deviltree) in 2005 (upon which she began using the shortened version of her name), Havranjel (Ravenangel) in 2011, and Jazver (I-Beast) in 2019. The Minotaur’s Daughter contains work from the first three publications, compiling them in a immersive, wildly populated series that plunges their readers into a universe of vivid imagery and sensation.

From Divosestra, the title of a particular poem, ‘Diabloň’, became the title of Luka’s second collection; samely, ‘Havranje’ from Diabloň became the title poem of her third collection, from which the poem ‘Jazver’ (I-Beast) became the title of her fourth collection. This interconnectedness between the poet’s body of work reflects her continuity of themes and imagery—an ever-deepening quest to go into more complex levels of introspection. Prominently featuring various creatures and their biological transformations, Luka preserves throughout a distinct focus on water and the moist elements of body and nature. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman

July 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

[Neuman] exposes this version of love for what it is, an ecstatic and embarrassing dissolution of the self.

In his latest and perhaps most personal work, Argentine writer Andrés Neuman probes his newfound role as a father, reckoning with the masculine and the paternal with trepidation, honesty, and most of all, wonder. The arrival of a child is here fortified with the poetry of discoveries—developing ultrasounds, the first tentative words—and the sublime language of an expanded self, as both father and son come to find their new places in the world. At once a universal and a deeply private story, A Father is Born is a testament to where the mind goes when it is led by love.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Open Letter, 2025

Andrés Neuman’s bios often begin by describing him as a son—specifically, that of Argentinian musicians who emigrated to Spain in the early 1990s. This intimate history has previously been explored in his writing, including in a collection of poetry about his dying mother, as well as a novel based on the dictatorship suffered by his family in Argentina. Now, continuing this occupation with lineage is a book that sees him wrested into a different position within the family: as a father to his newborn baby. A Father is Born was originally two separate texts, but arrives in English as a happy side effect of their translation by Robin Myers. The first, Umbilical, is a patient and forensic study of his and, to a lesser extent, his partner’s experience of expecting and then raising their child, Telmo, while the second, Small Speaker, explores the boy’s first forays into language and the mysterious assembly of a lexicon.

‘Little by little, I’m birthed as I speak to you.’ Each page of A Father is Born is akin to a poetic diary entry, ranging from the descriptive to the self-reflective. In the first section of Umbilical, titled ‘The Imagination’, Neuman explores the psychic nature of the fatherly bond pre-partum, detailing the subconscious effort of conjuring a loving connection to his future child. These opening chapters hum with the low frequency worries of a figure who knows about the precarity of life and miraculous ‘overlapping fates’ of ancestry: ‘. . . hands over hands over hands.’ In his wanderings around an expectant house, he realises how such fragility applies to the story he is building,

“More than their creator, I feel like their host,” your mother confesses.
Now I imagine us in concentric circles: you travel within a reality within our reality, which exists within ceaseless curves. What am I, then, in this home where your mother’s womb rocks and sways? Who do I inhabit?

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Performances of Masculinity: A Review of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh

July 21, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by mk zariel

Rock, Paper, Grenade is . . . a novel about how masculine social dynamics can transform and change its characters’ emotional lives.

Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, Seven Stories Press, 2025

When men talk about other men in the world of Artem Chekh’s Rock, Paper, Grenade, there is an external sense of kinship coupled with a subtle hostility—a language of insults and mockery that permeates every interaction. And within this, nothing is more feared and ever-present than the specter of queerness. Felix, the stepfather of protagonist Tymofiy and a prominent character throughout the novel, had experienced a “fulfilling and, by and large, carefree childhood,” yet still casually criticizes his brother for a perceived femininity. From comments about his choir involvement and “sailor suit” to the accusation of being a “faggot and wimp,” his familiar descriptions of his brother are laced with casual homophobia.

Throughout the novel, the F-slur is routinely thrown about when a male character behaves with vulnerability, and any feminine quality in men is roundly scorned; as such, Rock, Paper, Grenade is, at its core, a novel about how masculine social dynamics can transform and change its characters’ emotional lives. Felix’s presence is emotionally fraught for Tymofiy; when the two meet, Felix provides a role of care, yet he also uses hegemonic, power-driven masculinity—and its undercurrent of homophobia—to cause profound harm. In Chekh’s world, this duality of male vulnerability and aggression is of utmost importance, creating dramatic tension between the characters while underscoring the broader point that patriarchal behaviour profoundly traumatizes the emotional lives of men and boys.

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Singing, Electric, Body: A Review of bruno darío’s Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation

July 16, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Daniel Yadin

The glee and daring of darío’s style, his technicolor whiz-kid pyrotechnics, induce an especially poignant and headlong involvement. . .

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation is bruno darío’s mesmerizing monument to literature. Published as a tripartite collection by the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, it is both a posthumous triumph and an instance of translation as friendship, as a kind of company-keeping in one’s journey across states. When the Mexico City-based darío wrote these beguiling poem sequences during his twenties, he was suffering, then living, then dying of brain cancer, which ultimately killed him at the age of twenty-nine in 2022. The accomplished translator Kit Schluter recounts in his introduction that he was a good friend of darío’s (who insisted on presenting his name in lowercase since the laws of publishing would not allow him to publish wholly anonymously); the two of them, Schluter writes, “had become friends the way poets working in different languages so often do: by translating each other’s work.”

The Lantana trilogy, 153 English pages in all, recounts the doomed, fatal, gorgeous love story between one speaker, “the Inconsolable,” and his beloved, the terrific and terrifying Anfitriona, who kills herself in the first part of the sequence, “feast, fright,” then stays silent in the second, “airsickness,” as the Inconsolable writes letters about her, his life, and his work. Finally, in the third section, “raze,” she is able to speak a bit before the voice of Gravity—the gravity that pulls her deeper into the earth, into her final destination as earth—takes the final word.

There are several paths into darío’s work; I’ll start with Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is referred to frequently throughout the book, the magnum opus of the poet of the body facing the cryptic missives of a young poet approaching death. “I sing the body electric,” darío quotes in English in one of his poems, and he does—he sings the body electric, but he sings the body as it disappears from the realm of bodies past, the body as it crumbles or effloresces into the realm of the intellect and the image. These, more than the flesh, are the guarantors of eternity, and darío takes us on a tour of the seam between them and the real.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

“I will never die. I will dance. . .”: On Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

July 10, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Katherine Beaman

Wirpsza’s work may provide some guidance as to what the artist’s role could be in the face of humanity’s darker moments. . .

Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda, World Poetry, 2025

In the fourteenth century, writing from a state of political exile from Florence, Dante gave us an allegorical tour of the afterlife with an imaginary Virgil as his guide, presenting a cast of historical and mythic figures re-imagined. It isn’t hard to make the connection between him and the twentieth-century Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who, as he contended with World War II and its subsequent outfalls, wrote from a state of exile in West Berlin and introduced his own cast of mythic figures: Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stalin. Now, from Frank L. Vigoda—the nom de plume of translator husband-wife duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel—comes Apotheosis of Music, a selection of Wirpsza’s cerebral and exuberant oeuvre in an indulgent, cheeky, rhythmic English, at times originating its own pleasant musicality. Where Zlatkes lends his native Polish perspective, Frenkel’s background in musicology allows for an execution of the musical structures and themes prevalent throughout Wirpsza’s work.

Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1918 and educated in music and law, Wirpsza was drafted into WWII, held as a prisoner of war in a German camp, and, after initially being a supporter of communism following the war, eventually defected from the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) in objection to its policies. After publishing an essay critiquing nationalist identities called “Polaku, kim jesteś” (Pole, who are you), he was banned from publication in his native Poland—a sentence that lasted until 1989, four years after his death. He then settled in West Berlin, where he lived for the remainder of his life; there, he brought works of Polish literature to a German audience and vice versa, translating works like a biography of Bach and a novel about Mozart from German into Polish.  READ MORE…