Using the allegorical figure of a dog, these poems interrogate work, leisure, and the language of belonging. What does it mean to have a ‘pack’? Is it too late for a common dream of resistance?
Casbah
Seizing the field of speech, I mock myself.
Here stands the dog, and beyond the favela a meadow. Come near,
since you’re already feeding from the hand of dreams, heal your scars
in this anthem no one can march to.
We become a weld, a name from which a voice breaks free
to clash with mystery. Without a doubt:
we stand still as a heart, unable to amaze.
So, brother, when I mock myself,
trotting out among all those beautiful people,
ask if the dog you’re playing with is just a dream.
Start looking for answers, if you will,
why in this hive
I’ve reveled in ridicule, why I say
the cop that’s with you is low-hanging fruit?
Leash
This brooding keeps on echoing. So we content ourselves
with echoes. Clenched hearts flare with envy.
The mutt yanks us, creators of tenderness, from the chest.
But we go on expressing ourselves,
leave behind all comforts, boldly come into our own.
We invent tenderness and peace, which you refuse people.
Hearts sharp as crystal. I snivel from envy and burrow in the pack.
They say I lack manners when I bark.
To Decamp Without Bread or Arms
The mountains are in labour, an outlandish mouse will be born.
Go to work, then
look for another job. Your free time:
dreary and brief. Make plans, consume,
don’t get bored. The mountains
gave birth, brought forth a dog.
For him, each day will be like Sunday.
Translated by Karen Kovacik
Using the allegorical figure of a dog, these poems interrogate work, leisure, and the language of belonging. What does it mean to have a ‘pack’? Is it too late for a common dream of resistance?
Translation rights: Rafał Gawin, spplodz@go2.pl
Kasper Pfeifer’s he knows his place takes up questions of individual dreams and collective identity. It shines a light on powerful cabals bent on gatekeeping as well as outsider efforts to storm the Bastilles of language and power. Central here are the allegorical figures of dog and master, which reviewer Anna Kałuża sees as locked in hierarchies that are ‘economic, class-based, racialised and species-oriented’. Pfeifer’s dog sometimes resists what has been designated as his ‘place’ – in one poem he tells us, ‘they say I lack manners when I bark’ – and sometimes gives into the arbitrary whims of the master. Kałuża writes that Pfeifer ‘creates his own topography’, his ‘lyrical metronome becoming a kind of buffer against the language of violence, the language of menace, the language of terror’. The poems seek to imagine a ‘pack’ (sfora), a collective of potential camaraderie and resistance. Simultaneously, they themselves constitute a kind of pack, building meaning in conversation with each other, their words taking on additional resonances with each repetition.
Karen Kovacik
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
