PAVOL JANIK

 

PAVOL JANIK

 

A Shot

 

The moment air stops

close in front of your face

and checks the size of your lungs,

the moment the sun addresses you

with the agreed secret word,

then it'll be clear to you.

 

The horizon could be crossed

and other matters considered.

 

The heights furiously disclose

the concrete constructions of their peaks.

In the crowns of trees the telephone switchboards rattle.

 

You ripen an octave higher.

 

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY JAMES AND VIERA SUTHERLAND-SMITH

 

 

Daybreak

 

You emerge from beyond the horizon,

heedlessly towards darkness

and inattentive towards smothering dreams.

 

You lend an ear to silence

moderately

like the most distant thunder.

It has already been heard how you sound in the motionless bells.

 

You always dawn astonishingly the same.

 

Mists, lost within themselves, hesitate,

trust neither earth nor heaven.

 

All creation loses speech, dumbly move its lips,

startled so that the words flow back

within,

to make blood brighter,

to make pain,

to make them wholly incomprehensible,

neither outcry nor buzzing.

 

Thus nature copies you

Always from the outset

indirectly, insufficiently,

fervent about you

disappointed in itself,

It imitates current and circulation.

 

Softly you reproduce your portraits

- one after the other.

With a regular motion

you manage time.

 

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY JAMES AND VIERA SUTHERLAND-SMITH

 

 

Circling

 

Evenly and fast

always going round

it dreams about itself.

The old unbearable fan.

 

Its head makes the circles

of a drunkard's breath.

It imagines it is a propeller.

It circles.

It observes.

It sees and hears.

It knows more than the others.

 

Through its racket

regardless it takes the words

of the speeches of the café tribunes.

 

For so long it has belonged to the technical museum,

but not till now has it entered literature.

 

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY JAMES AND VIERA SUTHERLAND-SMITH

 

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.