PAVOL JANIK

 

PAVOL JANIK

 

Someone Like A God

 

I,

You,

He

And someone else …

 

- the fourth like a dimension,

the fifth a season in the year,

the sixth like a sense,

the seventh like a continent.

 

the eighth like a day of the week,

the ninth like a point of an octagon,

the tenth like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,

the eleventh like a commandment,

 

the twelfth like a football player,

the thirteenth like an apostle,

the fourteenth like Friday the Thirteenth,

the fifteenth like Louis Quattorze,

the sixteenth like the fifteen,

the seventeenth like a sixteenth,

the eighteenth like the seventeenth century,

 

the twenty-second like an eye,

the thirty first like a thirty percent fall in bonds,

 

the thirty third like a tooth,

the thirty fourth like Christ’s year,

 

- the unending like a god

and so just sexless,

 

the powerless

like one who makes love,

 

painless and therefore senseless,

 

unrivalled like a god

in the world who has no other gods,

ungodly like a god

who has neither a god beside him

or over him,

 

bottomless like a sky,

unrestrained like the wind,

boundless like thought,

immaterial like a ghost,

 

nameless bearer of an unknown name,

 

hopelessly faultless,

 

aimless like a perpetual runner,

 

childless like the father

of a crucified son,

 

unreasonable like death

and so just remorseless,

 

nationless like a god

of all people

and beings similar to them,

 

sightless and faceless,

legless, handless and wingless,

hairless and toothless,

 

safe as a harbour

for immortal wanderers,

 

without charge like a promise,

 

unparalleled in perfection,

derived in its own home,

unmediated like touch,

helpless like a deed,

dreamless like a night,

careless like a bird,

 

inconsolable like truth,

ungoverned as the oldest citizen in the world,

 

implicit as love,

without consequence like justice,

 

a creature without colour,

taste

and smell.

 

He wanders in space as if without soul,

a creator without parents,

a being without dwelling place,

a vagabond without address,

 

from beyond memory without work,

from time immemorial without bread,

forever he proceeds without footprints,

 

always thinks without considering

and always the same,

 

he breeds without hesitation,

gives birth without reason,

regardless of anything or anyone,

 

kills without dispensation

- everything and everyone,

since the beginning of the age of ages,

 

he abandons us without regard

for race, religion or conviction,

 

he always triumphs without battle,

judges without mercy,

punishes continuously

and then weeps without sorrow

over the spilt mother’s milk

of the immaculate virgin,

who bore him a son

so he could give him

deviously and thoroughly to be crucified

at the hands of his chosen people,

 

so he rules the world without check,

an uncriticised despot,

 

he acts unceasingly without rest

and knows everything without consciousness,

 

he prays to himself without words,

he accepts himself without reserve,

 

he grants himself adoration without consideration,

he is blessedly silent about himself,

 

so continuously decides without witnesses,

without rhyme or reason,

with no way out,

 

wholly without himself,

headless,

heelless,

heartless,

with not a drop of blood,

 

without anything.

 

Redeem him

while there’s time.

 

Perhaps his fate

awaits us, too –

cruel

towards all creatures

who have been surpassed by their own works.

 

 

Kosovo

 

(for Jan Tuzinsky)

 

A burning

paper Goethe

prays

in Serb

for four hundred dead children

 

In Schiller’s stone eye

gleams a tear of mercury

 

There’s a Gypsy weeping

for a little Romany fairy

at the bottom of the Adriatic

 

Blood

has an irresistible color

of the bluish dusk of the sky

from which falls

light and glitterings

like a gust of May rain

to fertilize the wounded earth.

 

 

New York

 

In a horizontal mirror

of the straightened bay

the points of an angular city

stabbing directly into the starry sky.

 

In the glittering sea of lamps

flirtatious flitting boats

tremble marvelously

on your agitated legs

swimming in the lower deck

of a brocade evening dress.

 

Suddenly we are missing persons

like needles in a labyrinth of tinfoil.

 

Some things we take personally –

stretch limousines,

moulting squirrels in Central Park

and the metal body of dead freedom.

 

In New York most of all it’s getting dark.

 

The glittering darkness lights up.

 

The thousand-armed luster of the mega city

writes Einstein’s message about the speed of light

every evening on the gleaming surface of the water.

 

And again before the dusk the silver screen

of the New York sky floods

with hectoliters of Hollywood blood.

 

Where does the empire of glass and marble reach?

Where do the slim rackets of the skyscrapers aim?

 

God buys a hot dog

at the bottom of a sixty-storey street.

 

God is a black

and loves the grey color of concrete.

 

His son was born from himself

in a paper box

from the newest sort of slave.

 

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, Kazakhstan, 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, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Vietnam.