Saturday, February 1, 2020

PAVOL JANIK



PAVOL JANIK


Prolonging My Understanding

For a while I hesitated,
at the place where one enters.
And then so many mirrors
as if after death or during it.
And so many unreal girls
in the shallow depths of the glass.

There, where I entered for the last time
still as a boy with portraits
of Pierre Brice and Lex Barker in a pocket,
was the window of a small wine tavern.
And above it the warning signals
of red pelargonia
had permanently remained.
These inexorable semaphores
which didn’t permit me
to speak in the direction of the wind
and turn aside as the wall approached.

I grew up
to the level of salaries,
the length of debts,
to measurable historical latitudes
and to a size
where the era of dieting begins.

Now only my hair grows
slowly and completely pointlessly.
and thus I come
to prolonging my understanding
and ridding myself of the purchasing power
of a powerless Samson.








At The Table

An infirmary of flowers of the field
in a vase.
So many of the white
that the blood inside our veins stiffens.

Thus we wither together
torn away from
life.








Nocturne For Diabetes

Diacritical signs
of immortal Dio
appear in the sky.
Dialogues of the diabolic
intersect within us.

Oh divine Diana
preserve our diagnosis,
sugar-beet campaigns and oil fields.

Save within us the diapositive
and make us diametrical.
Diagrams of sorrow
and diamond diadems
we place at your diagonals.
Oh dialectics of dia-marmalades.
Into our diaries we write
our last hour
and the deadline of our posthumous diasporas.
Just so that we don’t forget to die
and for the last time decorously deny ourselves nothing.

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.


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