Pavol Janik [Slovakia]

  

Summer
 
The sun smashes our windows.
An urgent song reaches us from the street.
 
On the cellophane sky
steam condenses.
Unconfirmed reports are reproduced
about the wind.
 
The trees are the first to begin to talk
about the two of us.
 
                                           (1981)
(Translated by James Sutherland Smith)
 
 
An Urgent Poem
 
Ceaselessly you enter my mind
like an urgent poem
to dispute fixed views on life
and change accepted images of the word.
 
Unstoppably you come
to electrify
the unshakeable conviction
that a man is a self-sufficient being.
Thus we always live unthinkingly together,
and far from one another
in our two-in-one dream.
Always you enter my mind
when I’m woken from sleep by air raids
of themes, images and pictures of poetry.
And thus I know that everything belongs indivisibly to ourselves
just as we do to each other.
 
This is the urgent poem,
whose point you force me to keep silent
like a secret,
where there’s no place for another
and which can exist completely without words
and other witnesses.
 
                                    (1985)
(Translated by James Sutherland Smith) 
 
 
Vivace Ma Non Soltanto Cosi
 
Barefoot
you leap from star to star.
And each time there’s a chime
like the kiss of crystal glasses.
 
Thousands of your faces
skate with perseverance
on frozen ponds.
 
I open you with a violin’s clef
and seek the bow
whose elasticity can equal you.
 
Deep in you
instead of strings
I’ve touched tears.
 
                                            (1981)
(Translated by James Sutherland Smith)
 
 
Ex Offo
 
Every day I pick up a pen up
afraid that it’s completely in vain.
Above the paperwork clouds of office work loom
like heavy opaque curtains.
 
It becomes complete
with neon illuminating
the office darkness.
There’s nothing visible from life
apart from cheap state furniture,
the various moods of colleagues’ faces
and always the same roof of a neighbouring house.
and to all this, it has to be said,
a bit of sky,
a personal pot plant
and a telephone, which should connect us with the world.
But we know very well
that it connects only with other offices.
It should be mentioned, too,
that this is only when it isn’t broken.
This hasn’t happened for a long time indeed.
 
We see nothing
and we know nothing.
We know nothing of what
in the light of day
new springs doggedly push to the surface,
from all the openings in the earth
mysterious water sprays out.
Pure and just
measuring the time
and other limits of our lives,
urgently seeking paths to a return to earth.
 
From the sky birds,
planes, comets and other heavenly things gather.
In the galleries pictures fall from the walls
and statues from their plinths.
Something is happening.
Something is going on.
 
With blue ink
I register my pulse,
the number of the dead, the amount of damage caused,
trunk calls and interruptions to working hours.
 
I know that I’ll get compensation for this poem,
or I’ll work at it over the weekend
after coming to an agreement with my employer.
 
                                                     (1985)
(Translated by James Sutherland Smith) 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Pavol Janik, PhD. (Magister Artis et Philosophiae Doctor) was born in 1956 in Bratislava, Slovakia, where he also studied film and television dramaturgy and scriptwriting at the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VSMU). He has worked at the Ministry of Culture (1983–1987). President of the Slovak Writers’ Society (2003–2007), Secretary-General of the SWS (1998–2003, 2007–2013), Editor-in-Chief of the literary weekly of the SWS Literarny tyzdennik (2010–2013). Honorary Member of the Union of Czech Writers (from 2000), Member of the Editorial Board of the weekly of the UCW Obrys-Kmen (2004–2014), Member of the Editorial Board of the weekly of the UCW Literatura – Umeni – Kultura (from 2014). Member of the Writers Club International. Member of the Poetas del Mundo. Member of the World Poets Society (WPS). Director of the Writers Capital International Foundation for Slovakia and the Czech Republic (2016–2017). Chief Representative of the World Nation Writers’ Union in Slovakia. Ambassador of the Worldwide Peace Organization in Slovakia. Member of the Board of the International Writers Association (IWA BOGDANI). He has received a number of awards for his literary and advertising work both in his own country and abroad. His works have been translated into 28 languages and published in 50 countries. This virtuoso of Slovak literature, Pavol Janik, is a poet, dramatist, prose writer, translator, publicist and copywriter. His literary activities focus mainly on poetry. Even his first book of poems “Unconfirmed Reports” (1981) attracted the attention of the leading authorities in Slovak literary circles. He has translated in poetic form several collections of poetry and written works of drama with elements of the style of the Theatre of the Absurd.