The fate of birds
Been reading only Japanese poetry
lately.
Has anything changed
in your life?
Nah. There’s a full moon.
I stopped reading Polish.
Poetry, I mean.
Why aren’t you a wood pigeon?
Mozart and candlelight…
Will your feathers grow back?
(The lipstick is quick to dissolve
in wine…)
I know nothing, I drift,
drunk every day, insulting
flyer distributors.
The Eye has its eye
on us?
I read Japanese poetry.
That is why I’m not
a wood pigeon.
Losy ptaków
Ostatnio czytam tylko poezję
japońską.
Czy coś się w twoim życiu
zmieniło?
Nie, nastała pełnia.
Przestałem czytać polską.
Dlatego nie jesteś
grzywaczem?
Mozart i świeczki…
Czy pióra ci jeszcze odrosną?
(Szminka szybko rozpuszcza się
w winie…).
Nic nie wiem, dryfuję,
codziennie pijany, ubliżam
roznosicielom reklam.
Wielkie Oko ma na nas
oko?
Czytam poezję japońską.
Dlatego nie jestem
grzywaczem.
The Swedish dragon
I have always lived
among drunks.
Today one
handed me a bouquet
of stolen flowers,
asking me
to get him across
the Sund.
We’ll drown
before getting devoured
by the Swedish dragon.
Szwedzki smok
W życiu otaczali mnie
zawsze pijacy.
Dzisiaj jeden
wręcza mi bukiet
kradzionych kwiatów,
prosząc,
żebym go przeprowadził
przez Sund.
Utoniemy,
zanim pożre nas
szwedzki smok.
___________________
Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdańsk and grew up in Warsaw. Since 1985
he has been living in Copenhagen. English translations of his work are available in Our
Flying Objects (trans. Joel Leonard Katz, Rod Mengham, Malcolm Sinclair, Adam
Zdrodowski, Equipage, 2007), A Marzipan Factory (trans. Adam Zdrodowski, Otoliths,
2010), Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013), Let's Go Back to the
Mainland (trans. Agnieszka Pokojska, Červená Barva Press, 2014) and Zero Visibility (trans.
Piotr Gwiazda, Phoneme Media, 2017).
Agnieszka Pokojska is a Krakow-based literary translator, mainly from English into Polish.
Her most recent work includes two volumes of essays by Margaret Atwood (forthcoming,
2021). She has been translating Grzegorz Wróblewski’s poetry since the late 1990s and her
translations have been published in book form (Let's Go Back to the Mainland, Červená Barva Press, 2014), in literary magazines and online.
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