PAVOL JANIK

PAVOL JANIK

 

From

Hurrah, It Burns!

(fragments)

 

2.

 

Seasonal poets, occasional critics

and café day labourers

dissolve their cheques books

and shirts in their morning coffee

in the hope

of more rational sugars.

 

Together with working hours

and other assets of the state bank

we flow reliably nowhere

only interrupted by the occasional capture

of a Slovak poet

for an overseas zoo.

 

3.

 

Re-educational concerts

seemed a little effective

in suppressing rising

prices, debts and children.

 

We don’t agree with the coca-

collaboration pepsi-collage.

 

Pull down the rock n’ roll-up blinds.

Let the music grow dark inside us,

this nth power of light

which only knows

about the human body.

 

4.

 

After the angel’s fall

from the twelfth floor

free fall

has become an Olympic discipline.

The development of rocket planes moves

to the principle of an angel

like helicopters.

The angel whirlybird

of airy propulsion

starts from the territory of the dandelion.

 

The developments and destructions

of peace culminate.

Let’s hurry away from here,

in this place

there’s no time to change the world.

 

In a moment we’ll be awarded

a Nobel for war

and our poetic guts

will in preference be used for sausages.

 

5.

 

Words refuse to obey.

 

The poem splits

and from it emerges

a video-clip scenario…

 

Poetry avoids words.

It abhors them.

 

A revolt against death

will occur in the afternoon

on the coast,

in the event of bad weather

it’ll take place at the pensioners’ club.

 

Take Baudelaire

dead or alive.

 

9.

 

Woman times man is almost three.

The most domestic animal

is a row-ptile.

Poetic fabrics are getting cheaper.

 

We rationalize the ascent

of concert wings.

 

We vote for Gigglewhite

and her seven little smirks.

 

Even the leaves have yet to fall

from the boulevard trees

and we’ve already fallen for the snow.

Grieved as a black man in winter

I listen to the momentary heavy mental,

monumental menthol,

amen Ementhal.

 

15.

 

Distorted humour

enters the bay leaves

on the poet’s head

who wakes alert

in the laurels.

The legs of clocks

and hands of insects

arouse the snow in us.

 

This is the damage of normalization.

There are these houses in the windows,

trees on the branches

and birds in feathers,

everything about nothing

and nothing about everything.

 

17.

 

Torpedoes explode

in frozen blood.

Under their surface we detect

a conspiracy against love.

In the spring gusts

we set traps for ourselves.

 

Loves strikes us

at the first contact

at the speed of the bullet

earth-air-water-fire.

Weary of espionage

in loosened hair

we vanish silently

like a shadow in rubber soles.

 

And you in the form of music

drizzle into the darkness.

 

Mysterious as a sacred cravat

on the neck of a hanged man

you demonstrate where I pointlessly

direct my gaze.

 

Incomprehensible

as a thirteenth chamber

in a two-room state apartment

you’ll explain everything once

and also blame me.

 

The little flame in the dusk of loneliness

gets stronger.

Hurrah, it burns!

A person

on the border

of his opportunities.

Hurrah.

It burns.

 

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, Austria, 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, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, the United States of America and Venezuela.