PAVOL JANIK

PAVOL JANIK

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.

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.

BAD HABIT

Every day

I go to work

for my wife, Olga,

so she has enough for shopping.

I must make an effort.

The weekend approaches

and the children would like to eat on Sunday.

We still have not succeeded

in breaking this bad habit.

PAVOL JANIK

Mgr. art. PAVOL JANIK, 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 Slovak Writers’ Society (1998–2003, 2007–2013), Editor-in-Chief of the Slovak literary weekly 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). Ambassador of the Worldwide Peace Organization (Organizacion Para la Paz Mundial) in Slovakia (from 2018). Member of the Board of the International Writers Association (IWA BOGDANI) (from 2019). 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, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Nepal, Pakistan, Poland,  the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, the United States of America and Venezuela.