• Willa Lentza

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• 19-01-2024, Friday, at 6:00 pm - Free entrance

Our literary evening (held in Polish on Friday, 19th January 2024, at 6 p.m) centres around three excellent books: Konrad Wojtyła’s latest poetry volume Scherzophrenia, Maciej Melecki’s third prose publication The Living Mummies, and Dariusz Pawelec’s edition of Witold Wirpsza’s Recovered Poems.

Though published by the Rafał Wojaczek Mikołów Institute Publishing House in Silesia, all these three books are related in various ways to the city of Szczecin.

The meeting is a prequel to our special annual Valentine’s Day programme WE LOVE BOOKS, to be held at the Lentz Villa as in the previous years, on 14th February.

Highly recommended.

Entry is free of charge.

About the books and their authors:

Witold Wirpsza – Recovered Poems

Witold Wirpsza, whose biography is closely associated with our city, is, as Piotr Bogalecki observes, ‘listed progressively more often as one of the major and most intriguing Polish poets of the 2nd half of the 20th century. In the last few decades in particular, his oeuvre has become an important point of reference for writers and other artists as well as a subject of literary research for scholars who come up with ever new interpretations of his poems, prose, dramas, and essays. No scholarly debates, however, can replace the pleasure and excitement of reading Wirpsza’s ‘new’ texts – deposited in archives for many long years, but now rediscovered and published in a quite different cultural context. The volume of Recovered Poems comprises a wealth of Wirpsza’s youthful verse as well as a fascinating collection of his late pieces.’ Some of the texts contained in this publication have been unearthed in the Pomeranian Library in Szczecin.

WITOLD WIRPSZA – b. 4th December 1918 in Odessa, d. 16th September 1985 in Berlin, where he was originally buried (later reinterred at Warsaw’s Służew Cemetery in Wałbrzyska St.). Wirpsza was a poet, prosaist, literary critic and translator (from German), husband of writer and translator Maria Kurecka. He made his debut as a poet in Kuźnia Młodych youth magazine (1935). He studied law and piano in Warsaw. After taking part in the defence of Oksywie in September 1939, he was a prisoner-of-war in the Neubrandenburg POW camp for officers and later in Gross Born. After the war he lived in Cracow and subsequently (1947-1956) in Szczecin. In 1956-1957 he worked for Po prostu and Nowa Kultura magazines in Warsaw. Following his scholarships to Berlin (1967-68 and 1970) and Lucerne (1970), in 1971 he settled in West Berlin. He authored numerous poetry and essay volumes, dramas, and novels.

Konrad Wojtyła – Scherzophrenia

Scherzophrenia, a new book by an author already very well known in Szczecin, comprises poems written in the last six years. The author has revised his poetic idiolect by extending the semantic range of themes derived from an individual’s confrontation with an ever more ‘disordered’ reality. Scherzo is a musical form based on rhythm and articulation, whereas the second element of the title, ‘-phrenia’, connotes mental illness. Wojtyła’s title is thus a travesty of the medical term for the split self, which serves in his poems not only as a metaphor or symbol, but also as an emblematic image of the disintegration of external reality structures. The process of disentangling bundles of semantic connotations turns language into a ‘forked code’ and makes it possible to break strongly internalised codes in the course of reading. This brings the reader to an epiphanic delta that reveals various glimpses of the antechambers of hell and the oblique trail as though of railway points that constantly lead us onto new tracks of life.

KONRAD WOJTYŁA, PhD – a poet, literary scholar and critic, columnist; Vice-Chairman of the Sławomir Mrożek Foundation, head of the Centre for Media Education and Interactivity at the University of Szczecin. Author of seven published poetry volumes, including Beyond-Question Mark (2017) and Under-Red. 111 Poems (2019), as well as The Reverse. Conversations on Literature (2014) and the monograph Anti-Antichrist? A Religious Wojaczek (2021). He was also a co-editor of Rafał Wojaczek’s Not from This Time: Unknown Pieces (2016) and of the album Rafał Wojaczek. I Was, I Am (2021), as well as scientific editor of the publication In the Chronicle of the Skin. The Reception of Rafał Wojaczek’s Oeuvre in the Twenty-First Century. Wojtyła’s writings have been translated into English, German, Czech, Ukrainian, Russian, and Slovenian.

Maciej Melecki – Living Mummies

Living Mummies is the third volume of Maciej Melecki’s notes, a roller coaster of multi-directional reflection on the complex oppression of the individual caught in the destructive machine of contemporary world. The counter-planes of the various texts in the book were inspired by the need to recover repressed or concealed truths, perceived subjectively through contrasted statements in varied types of language. Poetic prose coexists here side by side with analyses of authoritarian power mechanisms as well as essays and micro-reviews, all these intermingled with anecdotes and ephemeral thoughts. The eponymous Living Mummies recur throughout the volume as a figure of the stupefied, passive masses that view freedom in terms of material possessions and submit to all manner of manipulation, baited by bread and circuses from an authority that has absolute control over them.

MACIEJ MELECKI – b. 1969 in Mikołów. Author of poetry volumes: These Things (1995), Dangerously Close (1996), Mid-May Cold Spell (The Ice Saints, 1999), Cases and Inflections (2001), Bermuda Tales (2005), Always Elsewhere Everywhere – Selected Poems 1995-2005 (2008), Overload (2009), A Series of Breakups (2011), Fields of Progression (2013), Inversions (2016), Prask (selected poems in Czech, 2017), No Ground (2019), Threshold Itinerary – Selected Poems 1995-2020 (2020), Crushes (2021), as well as prose: Here and There (2017), Nowhere Else (2021), and Living Mummies (2023). The author resides in Mikołów.