PAVOL JANIK

PAVOL JANIK

NIGHT BUS

I admire the smiles

of the wax figures

and the drunks.

Their faith.

Their humility.

Their precision.

Their infallible wisdom

determined by the office of normalization.

I admire

their wallpapered souls

full of light and brocade.

Their responsibility and legality

surpassing

the price of taxis and wine.

I’m terrified by the indifference

with which they listen

to the heavy breathing of the last trolley buses.

 (1981)

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)

THE MOMENT BEFORE TOUCH

The air grows still.

As in an illustrated weekly

I leaf through your eyes.

To hear silence

as it walks in new shoes

and lulls the buzzing bees.

Somebody furiously addresses us with wings.

It’s said that you’ve seen

burning birds tumble from the sky!

It’s just at the base of your breasts

there’s something making a ceaseless hullabaloo.

(1981)

PAVOL JANIK

PAVOL JANIK Mgr. art., PhD., (magister artis et philosophiae doctor) was born in 1956 in Bratislava, 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), in the media and in advertising. 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 (from 2004). Member of the Poetas del Mundo (from 2015). Member of the World Poets Society (from 2016). 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 (from 2016). 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 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 presented himself as a plain-spoken poet with a spontaneous manner of poetic expression and an inclination for irony directed not only at others, but also at himself. This style has become typical of all his work, which in spite of its critical character has also acquired a humorous, even bizarre dimension. His manner of expression is becoming terse to the point of being aphoristic. It is thus perfectly natural that Pavol Janik's literary interests should come to embrace aphorisms founded on a shift of meaning in the form of puns. In his work he is gradually raising some very disturbing questions and pointing to serious problems concerning the further development of humankind, while all the time widening his range of themes and styles. Literary experts liken Janik's poetic virtuosity to that in the work of Miroslav Valek, while in the opinion of the Russian poet, translator and literary critic, Natalia Shvedova, Valek is more profound and Janik more inventive. 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.  Pavol Janik’s literary works have been published not only in Slovakia, but also in Albania, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Nepal, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, the United States of America and Venezuela.