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.