from Hurrah, It Burns! | Pavol Janik
(fragments)
2.
Seasonal poets, occasional critics
and café day labourers
dissolve their cheques books
and shirts in their morning coffee
in the hope
of more rational sugars
Together with working hours
and other assets of the state bank
we flow reliably nowhere
only interrupted by the occasional capture
of a Slovak poet
for an overseas zoo.
3.
Re-educational concerts
seemed a little effective
in suppressing rising
prices, debts and children.
We don’t agree with the coca-
collaboration pepsi-collage.
Pull down the rock n’ roll-up blinds.
Let the music grow dark inside us,
this nth power of light
which only knows
about the human body.
4.
After the angel’s fall
from the twelfth floor
free fall
has become an Olympic discipline.
The development of rocket planes moves
to the principle of an angel
like helicopters.
The angel whirlybird
of airy propulsion
starts from the territory of the dandelion.
The developments and destructions
of peace culminate.
Let’s hurry away from here,
in this place
there’s no time to change the world.
In a moment we’ll be awarded
a Nobel for war
and our poetic guts
will in preference be used for sausages.
5.
Words refuse to obey.
The poem splits
and from it emerges
a video-clip scenario …
Poetry avoids words.
It abhors them.
A revolt against death
will occur in the afternoon
on the coast,
in the event of bad weather
it’ll take place at the pensioners’ club.
Take Baudelaire
dead or alive.
9.
Woman times man is almost three.
The most domestic animal
is a row-ptile.
Poetic fabrics are getting cheaper.
We rationalize the ascent
of concert wings.
We vote for Gigglewhite
and her seven little smirks.
Even the leaves have yet to fall
from the boulevard trees
and we’ve already fallen for the snow.
Grieved as a black man in winter
I listen to the momentary heavy mental,
monumental menthol,
amen Ementhal.
15.
Distorted humour
enters the bay leaves
On the poet’s head
who wakes alert
in the laurels.
The legs of clocks
and hands of insects
arouse the snow in us.
This is the damage of normalization.
There are these houses in the windows,
trees on the branches
and birds in feathers,
Everything about nothing
and nothing about everything.
17.
Torpedoes explode
in frozen blood.
Under their surface we detect
a conspiracy against love.
In the spring gusts
we set traps for ourselves.
Loves strikes us
at the first contact
at the speed of the bullet
earth-air-water-fire.
Weary of espionage
in loosened hair
we vanish silently
like a shadow in rubber soles.
And you in the form of music
drizzle into the darkness.
Mysterious as a sacred cravat
on the neck of a hanged man
you demonstrate where I pointlessly
direct my gaze.
Incomprehensible
as a thirteenth chamber
in a two-room state apartment
you’ll explain everything once
and also blame me.
The little flame in the dusk of loneliness
gets stronger.
Hurrah, it burns!
A person
on the border
of his opportunities.
Hurrah.
It burns.
(1991)
Indian Literature Review | Author Profile |Pavol Janik, PhD., was born in 1956 in Bratislava, where he also studied film and television dramaturgy and scriptwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts. He has worked at the Ministry of Culture (1983-87), in the media and in advertising. President of the Slovak Writers’ Society (2003-07) and the Secretary-General of the SWS (1998-2003, 2007-2013). He has received a number of awards for his literary and advertising work both in his own country and abroad. This virtuoso of Slovak literature, Pavol Janik, is poet, dramatist, prose writer, translator, publicist and copywriter. His literary activities focus mainly on poetry.
Translator Profile | James Sutherland Smith, was born in 1948 in Aberdeen, Great Britain, is a poet, translator and critic. He began translating Slovak poetry with the help of other people notably Stefania allen who was his co-translator for “Not Waiting For Miracles”, the first anthology ever of contemporary Slovak poets in English. Since then with his wife, Viera, he has translated over 100 Slovak poets with significant collections of the work of Ivan Laucik, Jan Buzassy, Mila Haugova and Milan Rufus.¬ http://www.jamessutherland-smith.co.uk/about.shtml
Pavol Janik’s poetry comes out crisp; to think this is a translation! I haven’t encountered such depth of wit – and one that obviously comes from a master punster – since Oscar Wilde.