Pavol Janik

Pavol Janik Poems

Barefoot
you leap from star to star.
And each time there's a chime
...

2.

The moment we each have our own key
To the same flat
I'll shift a piece of the garden
...

Always when I think of you
dawn breaks above Buenos Aires
and the Atlantic has the inexplicable color of your eyes.
...

I stretch out the water
in which you are reflected.
With a shout to stop
...

5.

By just a point
you surpass successful fortune.
By just a drop
...

Every day I pick up a pen up
afraid that it's completely in vain.
Above the paperwork clouds of office work loom
...

Ceaselessly you enter my mind
like an urgent poem
to dispute fixed views on life
...

Every day
I go to work
for my wife, Olga,
...

From morning we tirelessly squander ourselves into the blue,
which falls short of the border between water and sky.
Into the blue in which the swimming routes of fish cross
...

The old move in.
Slowly and clumsily,
not of their own volition
...

Live life
without a car.
Be slower than a trolley bus.
...

Inside me a little bit of
a blue Christmas begins.
In the hotel room it's snowing
...

For a while I hesitated,
at the place where one enters.
And then so many mirrors
...

An infirmary of flowers of the field
in a vase.
So many of the white
...

Diacritical signs
of immortal Dio
appear in the sky.
...

Inside the typewriter
and on the printer's block
poems have died
...

In the fading lustre
of the hotel Alcron, Prague
I watch
...

It's getting dark in the revues,
in the carmined eyes of the dancers,
in the centre of the cleavage
...

Planes got it into their heads
that they were better than ships,
but pride comes before a fall.
...

Somewhere it's lit up
as if a misty memory
lights up in me
...

Pavol Janik Biography

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 (1983-87), in the media and in advertising. He was President of the Slovak Writers' Society (2003-07), Secretary-General of the SWS (1998-2003, 2007-2013) and Editor-in-chief of the literary weekly of the SWS Literarny tyzdennik (2010-2013). 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, which appeared a quarter of a century ago, 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, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, India, Israel, Jordan, Macedonia, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, South Korea, Ukraine, United Kingdom, the United States of America and Venezuela.)

The Best Poem Of Pavol Janik

VIVACE MA NON SOLTANTO COSI

Barefoot
you leap from star to star.
And each time there's a chime
like the kiss of crystal glasses.
Thousands of your faces
skate with perseverance
on frozen ponds.
I open you with a violin's clef
and seek the bow
whose elasticity can equal you.
Deep in you
instead of strings
I've touched tears.

(1981)

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