Grzegorz Wróblewski
(trans. from Polish Agnieszka Pokojska)
Expeditor
In memory of F.W.J. Schelling
Derry has just lost to Dublin.
Will the sea level rise now?
Thousands of men lost their teeth and wives today.
Benny S., for one.
(Coinciding powers, swarming drives…)
Meanwhile, my horse – the number 5,
my horse, Expeditor, do they know,
I wonder, that ejaculation inevitably leads
to disaster? But we act in the light
of the law of the Amager island:
Expeditor will surely complete the run, leaving
Clark and the farting Black Goodman behind…
Benny, I’ll treat you to gold fronts soon,
Though in my current, empirical life
I cannot upgrade from potency to the act itself.
A kind of dilemma (resulting in an unjust distribution of food which in turn causes a general hyperactivity of shadows and that’s how OFFensive literature begins)
In a publisher’s note I read that my poems
were poetry on the sheer prose of life –
on insects,
tangerines,
birds,
emaciated men suffering from cancer,
a beggar,
visiting one’s mother,
everyday activities.
As it happens, I am also the author of the following lyrical work:
Let us start again from scratch:
I’m the target of their archery practice
and all I do is… smile
nicely! I yank the arrow out
of my ass and wait politely
for a new one. Is this
what you really want???
The question now is, how should we classify this one?
Together with the ones on
insects
tangerines,
birds,
emaciated men suffering from cancer,
a beggar,
visiting one’s mother,
everyday activities?
Oh, the allure of symbiosis! It would be, then, a poem on an insect gorging on tangerines
who is the target practice of emaciated men suffering from cancer,
while a wise raven is devising revenge.
And all this
as seen by a beggar, a narcissist loser who,
after another visit to his mother, was sent to a psychoneurodefinitelydonotgointhere ward
but was by accident assigned to a barrack full of patients with a very different
diagnosis
& preferences…
It could also be a poem about an arrow yanked from the ass
in the evening, after sunset.
If that were the case, the note should be expanded:
poetry on the sheer prose of life –
on insects,
tangerines,
birds,
emaciated men suffering from cancer,
a beggar,
visiting one’s mother,
everyday activities,
an arrow yanked from the ass
(in the evening, after sunset).
SKY-BLUE HEADS
10 litres of half-price acrylic ocean!
We’ll give it the caption SKY-BLUE HEADS
and do a tour of the Jutland countryside.
Just think, the grim breeders of pigs
and ostriches…
We’ll tell them our paintings help
to harvest wheat but they’re really best for
mating under (we’ll add fertility planners
along with mysterious charts
involving the full moon.)
Then we’ll pack up and head off to some exotic island!
To search for a new version of pantheism.
Phosphorite Mining
Don’t lick my skin,
look me
in the face.
96 Syndrome
The day like a single glove on a fence
(Mrs. A. was run over by a train).
Poor English cows…
They ruined our civilization,
they did.
But we’ll all meet in heaven
anyway.
Concord
Warm earth. Our mouths are kissed
by mosquitoes that need their drink.
(Apparently we’re one big happy family!)
The waters of the canal on Christianshavn
gently rock snoring stars. We’re so close
to heaven today…
Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw, Poland.
Since 1985 he has lived in Copenhagen. 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 selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar 2002). He has also published a selection of plays. His work has been translated into ten languages. English translations of his poems/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 Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket Magazine, Otoliths, Streetcake Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Cambridge Literary Review, Cleaves Journal, Action Yes, Counter Punch, West Wind Review, AGNI Online and in 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:
Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK 2007),
A Marzipan Factory - new and selected poems (Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2010).
Chapbooks:
These Extraordinary People (erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK 2008),
Mercury Project (Toad Press, Claremont, USA 2008),
A Rarity (Cervena Barva Press, W. Somerville, USA 2009).
for more info see:
http://danskforfatterforening.dk/medlemmer/grzegorz3313.aspx
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 Magazine, The Journal,
Cambridge Literary Review, The Delinquent and Poetry Wales and most recently in the chapbook
A Rarity published by Cervena Barva Press.