Three Poems
| September 5, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 19, Number 3, May 2009 |
|
Grzegorz Wróblewski (bio)
Translated by Agnieszka Pokojska (bio)
In A Christianshavn Pub, Larsen Talks About His Undeservedly Settled Life
I know what you mean, Larsen. Just like me,
you are now a big fat pig stuffing yourself
with salted peanuts and reading gossip columns
about the Austrian Nazis who dominate
the Internet with impunity.
Don’t worry, Larsen! This could happen
to anybody! Fucking hell… Just look at the sad-faced
boys in orange jumpsuits, trimming shrubs
on the moat since morning. Would you like to have
anything to do with them again?
Rhododendrons
Rhododendrons absorb
the fumes of the roasting pig:
Do I remember the Vietnam war?
No, I don’t.
Would I like some meat?
No, thanks. No meat for me.
What I am doing here, then?
Watering the rhododendrons.
Dreaming Of Dragons (Mixed Media On Canvas)
1.
Francis would add more water.
2.
Treacherous pewter, Germanic symbols… The climate changes
slowly bring about hallucinations.
3.
The second-hand stuff seller noticed a juggler in the left-hand corner.
The juggler then challenged Arnaut Daniel.
(Feeling silly now? That’s not how you work your way up to gold teeth and a villa in Tuscany.)
4.
Nature painters hang themselves too.
5.
What we need is resistance poetry.
Guts!
6.
Are known to be local parts of the priest and the rhinoceros.
7.
I had no idea (the male lover dressed up as an intellectual).
Leaving grayness, you enter an even greater lack of contrast.
You’ll walk through a wall, remaining underground.
8.
A prisoner will be despised.
9.
And you’ll open one eye in the baths innkeeper’s room.
10.
Love manoeuvres?
11.
In the baths’ owner’s room.
Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published nine volumes of poetry and two collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into eight languages.
The English translations of his poems and/or plays have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Magma Poetry, Parameter Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Delinquent, Chicago Review, 3rd bed, Eclectica, Mississippi Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Common Knowledge, Word Riot, Practice: New Writing + Art, The Mercurian – A Theatrical Translation Review, Lyric, CounterPunch, Exquisite Corpse, Guernica, Jacket Magazine, Otoliths, Cambridge Literary Review, West Wind Review and in the following anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004), A Generation Defining Itself – In Our Own Words (MW Enterprises, USA 2007). Selected poems are available in Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK 2007), and new and selected poems are forthcoming in A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2010). His chapbooks to date are: These Extraordinary People (erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK 2008) and Mercury Project (Toad Press, Claremont, USA 2008), and A Rarity (Cervena BarvaPress, W. Somerville, USA, 2009).
Agnieszka Pokojska is a freelance translator and editor, tutor in literary translation at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and author of a number of articles on translation. Her translations into Polish include poems by Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, and Derek Walcott. Her translations of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s poetry appeared in the anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird, in Lyric Poetry Review, West Wind Review, Eclectica, Jacket Magazine, The Journal, Cambridge Literary Review, The Delinquent and Poetry Wales and most recently in the chapbook A Rarity, to be published by Cervena Barva Press.