Jerzy Jarniewicz
trans. by Piotr Florezyk
Two POEMS
The World is a Fairy Tale
Before they invented
the elevator, I climbed to you, like in the Russian
fairy tale about love, on a braid. And because you didn’t
have a braid, I ran to you across the surface of the sea,
like in a fairy tale about love, but an older one and in another
language. And because there was no sea, you were
my sea on which I ran and ran, silencing
the wind. I was about to tell you that God came next
and parted the sea from you, like in the even older fairy tale
about even older love, but it was announced in Texas that
the Playboy had died. Freedom for the bunnies! We drop our clothes and
mutually naked swim in a silver lake.
The Last One to Leave Shuts the Door
When several years after my mother’s death
I saw at my father’s, who is also dead,
another woman, I couldn’t forgive him.
Even though I was sleeping at the time
with three myself. One
I killed in my sleep, the second I sold at
the slave market in Istanbul, the third I turned
into a pillar of salt. The one who came after them
was Scheherazade. Inventing fairy tales,
she invented herself. When the sultan
finally asked for her hand,
she slit my throat with a petite
paper knife. I don’t blame her, since
I know well how stories about the magic carpet
end. But I hold it against my father that
he let a stranger into the kitchen, where
my mother and I, when she was still alive, kneaded
dough for pierogies.
photo by Jerzy Maciej Koba
Jerzy Jarniewicz, a Polish poet, translator, and critic, lectures in English at the University of Łódź. He has published twelve volumes of poetry and thirteen books on contemporary Irish, British, and American literature, and he has written extensively for journals including the Poetry Review, the Irish Review, and the Cambridge Review. He is editor of the monthly Literaturana Świecie (Warsaw) and translator of novelists and poets including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Edmund White, and Derek Walcott.
photo by Dena Florczyk
Piotr Florczyk’s most recent books are East & West, a volume of poems, and several volumes of translations, including I’m Half of Your Heart by Julian Kornhauser and Building the Barricade by Anna Świrszczyńska, which won the 2017 Found in Translation Award and the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. A doctoral candidate at USC, he is completing a volume of poems based on Holocaust testimonies entitled From the Annals of Kraków. His website is piotrflorczyk.com.