Category Archives: Translations

Dear Readers,

We’re not certain how, but our second instalment of Slovakian Poetry from our Spring season has disappeared into the aether – which is a pity, as these poets are well worth the read! (You can still see Part 1 & Part 3 under Translations, so make sure to check those out whilst you’re here.)

Today we are publishing Part 2 afresh, and hope it brightens your Tuesday – we know it has done so for us! What a gorgeous way to kick off our Autumn Season of the magazine!

Enjoy!

‘people / clays / permafrost’ by Ola Glustik

I was seven when my neighbour / father 
of four children decided to leave / at his home 
in the living room / and then the other / in the barn a shot 
in twelve other / a rope in an apple tree 

it was always minus twenty outside / beaten,
barren land /an economic crisis
and at home at the table the presence / a tea 
spoon you can’t bend 

We / the children of this street had the courage 
to play only in the cemetery / to prepare 
a grave space / to serve a simple 
ceremony / the end 

We remained silent for a long time / To this day 
we don’t speak /since childhood, we’ve had our mouths full 
of dirt and stones

Translated by Natalie Nera

‘The Inextricable Blade’ by Erik Markovič

The salt of the earth, unbroken 
I can vouch for forgiveness in the woods, in the lakes
in the shells of oysters, and in the womb of a lightsaber.

I am without the earth; I have not grown roots
with my hands in your hair, with my tongue
in your mouth, not on the Moon, I only fly
and pity the wide and clear field beneath me
Your field, that is neither tasteless nor flavoured with spices,
unbroken by my grace, untainted with my blood.

You cannot separate your arms from your body, and stretch them towards me,
although you would love to fly after me, like your soul, whose dove
I caught under my shirt when the body gave up.
And from her into the earth it flew until it got rotten during the flight and turned into black fertile soil.

From the breast of your burnt hills, you speak of your desire silently
high up in the trees, Seeds in whose name the branch does not sprout out, 
for only above your head, unmoving, it grows wild in brambles.  

Translated by Natalie Nera; from the collection ‘Ikoncikosť. Prestupovanie Slnka’

‘Weight of the Balance’ by Erik Ondrejička

Weight of the balance
in quiet dance of leaves
in a body of ash

in orbital curves
of a path in rough sketch
that’s vanished in a flash

Decodes delicacy
so it may be pure
with hardly a word said

and from lead creates
like an alchemist
ever newly lead

Translated by John Minahane

‘sulphur’ by Martina Straková

touches our sun-tanned bodies
in the spots
where shingles
impress their shape we go barefoot
to make us feel again
that we’re still living
that nothing of this is sham
haptically
we sink our roots at the most trusty points
where salt means pulp
and water is dim and cold

Translated by John Minahane

Meet the Poets!

Ola Glustik (b. 1987, Slovakia) is a poet, publicist and media specialist. Currently working on the manuscript of the third poetry collection called Body and (con)text. Part of manuscript was awarded in prestigious czechoslovak competition Básne SK/CZ 2021. Ola is going to participate in the Spring Edition of the Visegrad Literary Residency Program in 2022 in Bratislava.

Her second book Atlas of biological women (2017) was awarded with the premium prize by the Slovak Literary Fund and with The M. Rúfus premium prize. This book was published partly in Czech (in anthology Být knihou a v rukou se ti otevřít, Nakl. P. Mervart, 2019) and in Romanian (Atlasul femeilor biologice, frACTalia, 2020, transl.: Mircea Dan Duta). She debuted with the collection of poems called Placed into trees (2014).

Her poems and publicistic texts were published online and in magazines in Slovakia (Rozum, Fraktál, Glosolália, Knižná revue), in the Czech Republic (Ravt, Revue Weles, Cadena Magica, Poli5), in Romania, Peru and Serbia. They were also read in Slovak national radio and published in numerous anthologies.

She is one of the founding members of the Bratislava author’s club BRAK, which is an incubator for the young writers in the Slovak capital city. In 2019 worked as a secretary of the Slovak PEN Centre.

She worked as a journalist in the regional newspaper and in the economic daily newspaper. Nowadays she is working as a media specialist for two big construction and industrial companies.

Erik Markovič (1972) – poet, philosopher and songwriter. He has published a set of 7 collections of poetry: Ikonickosť. Prestupovanie Slnka. (LN Studňa, 2014), from philosophy Po-postmoderný princíp palintropickosti 1 (LN Well, 2017). Through his writing and work, he seeks to identify post-postmodern aesthetic principles. From 2018 to 2021, he was the president of AOSS, The Association of Authors’ Organisations in Slovakia.

Erik Ondrejička was born on May 1, 1964 in the Old Town of Bratislava, where he still lives and works. He is a graduate of Bratislava’s Technical University, Department of Geodesy and Cartography. He has been writing poetry for more than three decades, however, he made his publication debut in 2004, with the collection On the Inner Side of the Eyelids. Five of his eight books have been awarded literary prizes (Eyes and Rhymes, On the Inner Side of the, Eyelids, (e)Pigrams, Say Just a Word) and Happygrams. Eyes and Rhymes, the revised version of On the Inner Side of the Eyelids, the bibliophilic collection IM PULZ – Waiting of Substance, AB80, Happygrams and Abecedári received honourable mention in the competition for the Most Beautiful Book of Slovakia in 2010-2019. Abecedári was also awarded the Bronze Medal at the Creativity International Awards (USA) and in the national competition for Best Children´s Book of Summer 2015 and Most Beautiful Children´s Book of Summer 2015. Erik Ondrejička is a member of the Slovak PEN Centre and the Club of Independent Writers. More information at https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Ondreji%C4%8Dka

Martina Straková (Slovakia) studied cultural sciences and graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the Comenius University in Bratislava. She received scholarships at leading German universities and her PhD title in Philosophy. For her poetry debut Postcards from Invisible Places (Pohľadnice z neviditeľných miest, 2019) she received the Bridges of Struga Award for the best poetry debut in 2019 awarded annually under the auspices of the UNESCO by the world’s renowned poetry festival, the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in North Macedonia. Since 2013, she has been co-organizing the International Poetry Festival Ars Poetica, where she holds a free creative writing workshop Bring Your Poem offered to the wide public as a regular part of the festival program. She is dedicated to writing poetry, fairy tales for children, painting and artistic translation from/to German and English language. She lives and works in Bratislava. www.martistrak.sk 

Video-poem “I’m Sheltering from a Storm”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmVM8f4DKCE 

The poem sulphur comes from the poetry collection Martina Straková: Postcards from Invisible Places, Ars Poetica Publishing House, Bratislava, 2019, translated into English by John Minahane.

with Raspberries on Her Fingers

by Miroslav Dávid

i think everybody would want her
and preferably if she were only theirs
nailed upside down
bleeding raspberries on the Marian cross 
from steel reinforcement

with raspberries on her fingers 
she won’t hurt anybody

 they’re from her garden 

that is like a poem 
and from all the healing herbs of true love and shots of rum

 so don’t you interfere, devil 
even if she’s bare to her soul
she’s going to be mine. 

Miroslav Dávid writing as Moddivari and River Salome: “with Raspberries on Fingers” (Elist Publishing, 2018)

Ripe

by Danica Hrnčiarová Šišláková

burlesque tones of silly wishes
reverberated in the trumpets of Jericho
forgiven is the one 
who wounded
the beast inside me that doesn’t grow

the battle is over
only silence now 
I peer into the poetry window
I’ve (hopefully) won the duel with pride
the other results – one all

The Ballad of the Pearl (to All Petrarcas)

by Vladimír Skalský

Like a scalpel stuck in the chest
a grain of sand hurts so much
it penetrated the oyster’s armour
only because 
In the moment of weakness
It was let close to the heart

There is nothing left
but to wrap the pain in beauty
to dull the pain with words
and, with the cut-up heart,
toll furiously
all the bells
of the lonely bedroom

I Stopped You

by Vladimír Skalský

I stopped you in the street
Maybe you would have been run over by a car
Maybe you would have met a great love
And your son might have destroyed the world
Or solved the nuclear waste problem
I held you up for three minutes
Surely another sperm would make it
Marilyn Monroe would have crooked legs
Kennedy’s assassin wouldn’t be born at all
Ten years from now, we’d land on Mars

I stopped you in the street
And that is how I changed the world

Meet the Poets

Miroslav Dávid is a Slovak poet, an award-winning lyricist who celebrated massive success with hits for Slovak rock and pop acts in the 80s. He is also a music manager and producer. So far, he has four poetry collections published: Rogalo, veľryba a Kristus Pán (2017: Trio Publishing, Bratislava), Detox (2017: Silvia Hodálová – VIUSS, Bratislava), s Malinami nastoknutými na Prstoch (2018: Vydavateľstvo Elist), Domino (2019: Vydavateľstvo Elist). He has also been awarded prestigious literary prices such Mobel Prize 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively or Pars Poetry 2018. He has three children and two grandchildren. He is divorced.

Danica Hrnčiarová Šišláková, an award-winning poet and a software analyst, comes from Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) but is currently living in the Czech Republic. She started writing first poems when she  was about 8 years old. At the age of 13, she became a published poet: she published in the literary supplement of the magazine Nové slovo, with then the editor-in-chief Vojtech Mihálik and in the anthology Právo na píseň. After starting a family, she took a long hiatus from writing. After 2015, she returned to poetry again and ventured to read it publicly. Her poems appeared in many anthologies in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, as well as publication in the online magazine of the Association of World Writers (AWW). 

Vladimír Skalský was born on April 26, 1972 in Prešov, Slovakia, where he graduated from grammar school. Later, he earned a master’s degree in theoretical physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. As well as running his own business, since 1992 he has held a number of public office positions and management positions in various media corporations. Since 1996, he has been the vice-chairman of the Slovak-Czech Club and deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Slovenské dotyky (Slovak Touches), and from 2004 to 2013 he was the editor of the literary quarterly, the Czech-Slovak journal Zrkadlenie/Zrcadlení (Mirror/Zrcadlení). Since 2006 he has been the President of the World Association of Slovaks Abroad, and since 2009 he has been the Vice President of the Europeans in the World, based in Brussels. Since 2014 he has been the director of the Slovak House in Prague. He is a member (2004 – 2010 and from 2019 until now) and Vice-Chairman (2005 – 2008) of the Government Council for National Minorities of the Czech Republic. He has authored many books: the collections of poems To Silence (2000) and From Two Shores (2017) and the collection of essays Keywords: Prague, Slovakia, literature (2004). All in all, he appears as either an author, co-author or editor of about thirty books. He was co-editor of the three-volume anthology of Slovak literature abroad Between Two Houses (2008-2010) and co-editor of Čítanka moderní slov. literature for secondary schools (2003). His poems and essays have been translated into English, French, Czech, Chinese, Hungarian, Russian and Serbian.

All translations by Natalie Nera.

I Keep Hosted in my Memory

Elí Urbina

I keep hosted in my memory
the placid image of the body of love.
Light must come again,
but now, in reality, only the rain
drapes the avenue as black birdseed.

Look at the slow descent of
meat’s thorn into the secret wound.
The brothel, its greed, absorbs my burnt-out soul,
my hope, thirsting of feeling,
for an instant, the deaf crackle.

In the gloom the prostitute dances 
with the sinuosity of a broad flare.
Already the longing gathers around in the mirror,
the shadow of my hand lengthens.

As strong as the pleasure burns
always her face inside me ignites.

From The Abyss of Men (2020)
Transl. into English: Sofía Leibovich

Opening an Old Fayad Jamís Notebook on Friday Afternoon

Julio Barco

In the winter of the summer I describe my eyes, I
the labyrinthine animal that still dreams
          opening the notebooks
between the divided rooms the score of life.

Old lovers buy
           dry bread in the cellars.

This poem starts here.
Foolish way of repeating the body;

This is the poem
Nothing but a shaky line that is
dream verse.

As the city sinks into depression
I separate signs and petals.

I am the one who watches over your name.
I am the one who observes
                                from your window the neighborhood
barely illuminated by the sunset poles.
The most beautiful youngsters are thrown
                                    of the Electric Towers.
The most beautiful young
               are launched from the Electric Towers?

My long hair is now a fucking form of
              walk against the wind.

Sailor of pampas, land, asphalt, poultry.
Girls commit suicide in their rooms
Yesterday everything was excessively sad
Everything will repeat itself or bifurcate the same
It doesn’t matter: I started another poem and came back
the same:

1. Inert object shakily disposed
                     on the table.
2. Street closed as destruction and desire.
3. Movement of machines & bodies.
4. This poem will begin when everything explodes.
5.Our bodies collapse.
6. We organize a concert in a body predisposed to joy
to correct this. Good.

                                 We will walk again.
I am the same one who drew
                  centuries ago in your womb
                                  A brilliant labyrinth of a thousand Sunflowers.
We repeat ourselves in the constellations.
                                  My fruit flavor intoxicated your hair.

***

A piece of jazz hissing through your body.
Everything changes and sprouts and multiplies.

The poems we repeat now are emptiness
Nothingness – a lilac flower.
Something mystically recognisable
when we are absence
looking behind the windows?
The beatniks have died
And Gary Snyder walks
The lonely mountains.
I walk the night.
You send your poems to other countries.
Reading the poem
leads to an understanding of its nature.
Nothing personal.
My poetic voice mutated in the neighborhoods
where we prepare lentils
And we boiled our sorrows
My poetic self is born
Sad blue lilac full of clouds
That the celery did not diminish
And so we love each other
Ambulances roam the city
Between Oscillations and Digital Semblance
In fornice
Of the silenced bodies
in the only concert that we give
At the time
in the only possible movement.
The Concert of our open green clear eyes
To the absolute mystery
To the burned factories and to the land
Did the young people jump from the Electric Tower today?
And we are And we run
And it’s cold in this damn city
That is my poetic art: our savage
Hungry,
the wind shaking your face.
Vague. Way.
I’m listening. I observe.
I am all this crazy movie where
Verb is beauty and lucidity a body
Looking for another.
I look for you.
This way of mine to flee is to pronounce your
Name.
The clarity of a dinner
well prepared.
Sometimes rooms or verses
Sometimes Stefan Joyce or Li Po
While we were cutting a tomato
Cool as the diagonal that
runs through my body when I touch yours.
When in yours I go back to mine
I recognize myself as a void between multiplication and clay.
When I hiss your name
In the mist of hearts.
This is my time.
Oh streets, I’m so sorry to come back
To live everything again
The poem will be a frozen room
The poem will be two bodies
The poem will be some dark images that I
I gently release between
The Axials of Terror and Glory.
The poem will be a path through the fire.
The poem will be a star.
The poem will be a way of feeling abstracted: a state in the crowd.
The poem will be the image of a man looking at the glass from a window.
The poem will be my hand looking for yours.
The poem is an angel about my loneliness.
The poem is a lost shoe.
The poem is your body
The poem is your mouth.
The poem is my destiny
Party in unrest.
Saturday without you.
We disappeared in the restless dawn
That you smashed in a can
of beer.
The body of the poem silently longed for
when we were two crazy teenagers
Seeking to satisfy our abysses
Oh Lima take me away from Minor Silt
Of the stars multiplied in my Phallus
Relatively common sentimental conversation
Facing the Centuries
Repeating the maze of the body
Labyrinth that I silently observed inside myself
Within others,
Within the total Other that is the Orb
And my mind opening between the cracks
Of the days / Smoke from the streets black prayer of the tuna
We will always long for the same poem
That perfectly leads us to ourselves
Labyrinth within Our Music
Music that croaked within our circumference
And I have rewritten our life:
Saturday or Friday night landscape
Looking for love on the long hard streets and
All the asphalt was the lost crevice of your face
We woke up looking for a ceviche in Puente Piedra
I still make love to you as the year closes with
Some rum in the room
10 lucas is all I have in my bank account
And I walk alone &
The poem
               it’s a mind game within our intensity
The poem
               It is the safe conduct to our temporality
The poem
                  is the concert of our honesty
The poem
                  it’s the concert of our decade
The poem
                  it’s your body, Antonio, Mara, streets, Miguel,
Ovid, Malaga, Omar, Agamemnon
The poem
                 between roses and glasses clothes and perspiration
From the fire of colours falling on
Your belly: wildfire, beauty, landscape, poem, theorem
Of chaos, fire, bodies that I deliciously
I became my alchemy. Eyelids
From the crazy city where I dance or play dreaming
This bouquet of wet roses that ended
Being my voice and my body, passion that is chaos
In mind awake where I slide
To know your eyes: what is
The Literary Work? What are your methods
In the garúa of faces and symbols
In the semen of infinities, what is reality? Ah, damn summer, you bastard
In the boredom of bitter girls
And I decided it embroidered on my hair a long
Grimace, a long beat of bitter flowers.
The speed of my rhythm. And here we start
This new notebook to protect my eyes
Of the folly of a world that is more deplorable every day.
And behind were the bodies that I silently loved
And behind, my house and the light from the windows, and the
Terrible affection that nobody knew how to give. And here,
In the showcase of loneliness, among the gardens of boredom,
I repeat your body virulently, I long
I rise, kiss, lunge, dream, I light up your voice
Intensely the voracity of our bodies.
And despair gave me this world that I
I turned on with the clarity of my mind. And now I do not bathe and I walk alone,
Disturbed between streets and hermit smiles.
And poetry was something that we tirelessly repeated:
Streets, bodies, pieces of a ballad that I placed in your eyes,
Insomnia, verses by Borges or Gelman, a ballad
De Manzanero while he was looking for the ideal epigraph
To simply show my intensity.
Chasing the writing was the verse itself.
The verse itself mutates into the plurality of I’s.
Perfection is not enough for me, I do not want the absolute.
Abstract thinking as an aphorism translated from English
To French, To Spanish
That simply reveals the chaos of a polished mind
As Kavafis thought
As I knocked on your door and you opened a quiet page
By M. Proust. I think we have nothing else left.
Except buying old editions of Verástegui
Find a volume of Eminescu to use his verses
As an epigraph
Walk, Walk, Breathe, Burn
Live it, inhabit it like a strange fire that haunts it.
Sing it, cry it, we inhabited the verse like a summer
Open with shorts and fear of going out on the streets
That was the saddest month.
I only want my little room where I dream verses
Or streets or landscapes that are necessarily another matter.
Another matter to describe the course of your mind
Inside silently sad computers.
And my sadness is miles of verses
That one day I will dream for you while
I miss you between the rooftops and loneliness, loneliness
And cats opening black garbage bags
Black tears of my still raging loneliness
Turned into a little hymn landing on the wings
Of the Lepidoptera. And it’s true, I’m depressed
Or sad or with a thousand rebellious sunflowers inside my eyelids
And my eyelids are all my crazy mind full of I’s
That, as Julio Herrera points out in metric verse,
It is the shuddering Me before the mud of the dough.
The Shocked Epoch tenderly overwhelming your sex.
And you shine so brilliantly.
Oh party, Lima is my crude city and my country
Lima is a luminous melody growing happily
and my crude way of walking and watching and scratching my music
Two young men haunted by hatred searching
A small room to love each other.
And yes, I am a boy and I love you, and I will shut up when you
Naked and I undress and we are this country
Open, shattered, cracked like your lips.
And that’s why I wrote this poem and started another
Within the same axial axis of your mouth.
Not this one, pick and choose in thickness
Of meaning the most. And what difference does it make to have
Been the fire if today we are but two
Silent truths. So far from love I speak
So far from faded feelings
That I reject my voice from another year, my loneliness
Now written between papers and cutlery
And this need to walk or stroll quietly
By rooms. I stared at a fly
That flew above volume two of the Work
Complete by Neruda. And I opened that little book of Fayad, the Cuban, Jamís. Days of getting bored and immediately writing the seizure
And convulsion is thousands of streets or pains. And all my power
It is to fix my eyes on you now that you are sobbing between
Your memories: streets, houses, shattered country, April
It’s the most stupid month, you know, you have to work
To pay for the receipts, electricity, streets, songs
And I also remember that we slept in the eye
Of a newly pregnant mother.

Face

Walter Velasquez

Seeing the glow of your beauty
What does your beauty contemplate
Accompanied by your nature
And freshness

It is your face that amazes me
Quiet and distracted
Leaving my eyes blind
And my body turned off

Frankly I don’t know if this will be art
Oh no if it’s art, oh I don’t know if it’s art
But I can’t deny what it is
Brighter than ever
Have been seen
Oh blazing, oh blazing

About the Authors

Elí Urbina (b. Chimbote, Perú, 1989) is licensed in Letters and has a Master’s degree in University Teaching and Pedagogic Research. He has published the poetry collections: “La sal de las hienas” – The salt of the hyenas (Plectro Editores, 2017) and “El abismo del hombre”- The abyss of men (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2020). His poetry has been translated into Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, French, Italian and English. He is the founder and director of the poetry magazine Santa Rabia.

Julio César Barco Avalos (b. Lima, 1991) is the author of the books Me da pena que la gente grow (Arteidea Editores, 2012), Breathe (La Chimba Editores-2018-Writers Guild Award), Vastísima Architecture (Editora Huachumera-2019-Huauco de Oro Award), Arder (grammar of the dandelions) (Editorial Higuerilla-2019), The music of my head Vol. 7 (Language Peru -Editors) In 2019, he presented Semen (music for young lovers) (Language Peru – Editors). He is the founder and director of the TAJO group. In 2020 he published four books during lockdown: Des(c)ierto (Metaliteratura, Argentina 2020), the re-edition of Semen (Metaliteratura, 2020) and two volumes in Colombia: Operating System (SO, 2020) and Copy, cut, paste, load (Obra Abierta, Colombia, 2020). He is currently Editor of Literalgia and Lima Gris and Manager of the Poético Río Hablador Cultural Project (which develops poetry projects in El Agustino) and directs the website Lenguajeperu.pe, which is a new national blog of Peruvian and Latin American poetry and art. He obtained an honorable mention in the XI Young Poet of Peru contest (2020) with the poetry book Semilla Cósmica.

Walter Alexis Velasquez Mendoza is 24 years old. He is a journalism student at the Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University. He has been involved in literary activity since he was twenty years old, where he made his first poetic presentation at the Oral Poetry Slam, at the Reporteros Infiltra2 collective. He has participated in national anthologies such as “El Dolor de la Tinta” (Editorial El Verso Azul); “El Mar No Cesa” (Editorial Ángeles del Papel); “Al Lado del Camino” (Marginal Editions), among others. His writing has appeared in both national and international magazines. Previously, he worked in the Federation of Journalists of Peru, in the Diario La Verdad Municipal and the literary magazine Buensalvaje. He is currently an editor and reporter for the digital portal La Cuarta Noticias.