National Poetry Month : Kacper Bartczak, trans. Mark Tardi

 

Rumors

                     Uh-huh it was the little guy in the church
                     uh-huh that’s good we’re on the train
                     when we get there we’ll call you
                    uh-huh bye then
                                                   (overheard)

 

By then it’s yellow brick roadkill it’s space sludge
a cluster of pictures a synthetic voice
reserving a granite suit
glad you’d been were alive uh-huh bye
we’re a clear signal lingering in your wake

Wired I slip away on cue
cured I cut my meat query cling
to you I’ll call you push the letter of desire
I’ll treat filter out flow into the ether
with a carbon copy I’ll remember you
with a poem like a myelin mesh

the voices of loved ones
in silicon slate a liquid sleeve
we’ll sing this love of each other
inscribed on the sleeve the intoxicated sense
catches on us on the poem like embers
opalescent ash

 

 

Translated from the Polish by Mark Tardi

 

 

Kacper Bartczak [photo credit: Grzegorz Wołoszyn & Biuro Literackie] is a Polish poet, scholar, and translator. Recent volumes include Czas Kompost [Time Compost] (2023), Widoki wymazy (2021), Naworadiowa [Radionaves] (2019), Pokarm suweren [Food Sovereign] (2017), and Wiersze organiczne [Organic Poems] (2015), which was nominated for two major awards in Poland. He has translated and published volumes of selected poems by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi. as well as the work of many other poets into Polish. In English translation, recent poetry of his has appeared in Poetry, ANMLY, Denver Quarterly, Interim, MAYDAY, and Berlin Quarterly. His awards include two Fulbrights––at Stanford and Princeton, respectively––and a fellowship from the Kościuszko Foundation at Florida Atlantic University. He is an associate professor and department chair at the University of Łódź.

Mark Tardi [photo credit: Joanna Głodek] is a writer and translator whose recent awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and his translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive Press) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. Recent writing and translations have appeared in Poetry, Conjunctions, Guernica, ANMLY, Full-Stop, Interim, Cagibi, Denver Quarterly, and in the anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition Press, 2023). Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland will appear with Litmus Press in September 2024, and his chapbook of translations of poems by Kacper Bartczak is forthcoming with above/ground press. He is on faculty at the University of Łódź.