Wednesday, April 1, 2020

PAVOL JANIK



PAVOL JANIK


Chrysanthematika

Inside the typewriter
and on the printer’s block
poems have died
in which spurs have clinked
of the disobedience and the pride
of the blue blood
of the noble ink.







A Dream From The Glass

In the fading lustre
of the hotel Alcron, Prague
I watch
as you sleep at the bottom of a mirror.
a jasmine breeze
disseminates your visions,
it hums your mute desires.

All the radio stations
broadcast the beating of your heart.
In the receiver
of every telephone
your breath is heard.
On every television channel
they show
your sleeping face
live in the mirror of the hotel Alcron.

I am the television camera
of your glass sleep.
Your crystal dreams are dreamt by me.

Sparkling you drizzle on me.
Your naked ness is veiled
in a mist of hotel curtains
which in vain I try to blow away
with my last breath before I sleep.

It’s late.

Flying lovers
gently switch off
the great night city.
A dancing couple
of violet neon
twinkles drowsily
in the dark blue sky.

Diplomats
tailored in satin
and surfeited with soap bubbles
leave opera performances,
concert halls and receptions
and in limousines
constructed of air,
darkness and glittering stars
fly away like comets
to their state beds
in a twilight of ambassadors.

Garden parties finish.
The blossoming trees
drink from fountains.

In the squares
without shame or movement
statues from different eras,
genres and sizes
make love.

Tireless taxis, ambulances
and police vehicles
quietly sink to the river bed
while the frightened fish
turn on their alarm sirens
and switch on coloured beacons
of anxiety.

In the empty streets
delayed pleasure boats fly
full of trembling lights
and moor themselves
in the last empty shop windows.

It’s late.

From the highest floors of the heavens
leisurely and at length
flashing lanterns fall.
Phosphorescence shines
on the wings of night butterflies.
It sounds
as if a thousand solitary towers
breathed
the brassy midnight air.

So much would I like
to dream you, too.







The Last Four Bars Of Silence

It’s getting dark in the revues,
in the carmined eyes of the dancers,
in the centre of the cleavage
of a monumental bosom
and in the snowfall of ostrich feathers.
It’s getting brighter deep within wood,
in flower pots
and botanical gardens.

The lights go off in the last windows
of ministerial offices
made of cardboard, telephone lines
and salary cheques.
The wind delivers
autumn leaves
of strictly secret material
into the unvetted hands
of nightwalkers.
Sensitive lovers
are on guard in the parks
armed to their teeth
with rapid firing sentiments -
calibre forty-five.

And it always dawns.
Over the pages of newspapers
the moulds of white hot dreams hiss
on contact with the icy air.
Mutes enthusiastically play
their leading role
and the powerless director
with his head in his hands
and bust fuses in his head
repeats to the point of madness
the last four bars of silence.

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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