Przemysław Gintrowski - Kredka Kramsztyka

Tłumaczenie:

I

Eyebrow's taunt climbs towards temple
Eyeglass carefully pinches the eye
It saw London, Rome, Powiśle
How is it supposed to avoid the irony?

Hairstyle- rather lordly
Tie in accordance with suit
To know success, good taste, culture
Nothing but to draw and paint.

Hand with pipe and signet
Effortless mastery over the workshop
Savvy about the brush and the world
After all, Truth is a self-portrait.

There were looking at his sundry faces
Madrid, New York and Vienna
And he was some Varsovian Jew
But, first of all, he was a painter.

And when he met the peaks of fame
He visited his mother- like every year
And he was by her side when she died
And he had not left Warsaw anymore.

II

It is hard to be surprised by our exasperation
Driven to remove traces
Of the Final Solution of Judenfrage

We were dumping limp corpses
Stripped from the rests of dignity- under constraint.
Verily, there was nothing unhumane about them.
Just a large number of run-over cats
Even beautiful animals- dead, they put one off.

Heroically we held nausea
Humane reactions putting us in danger of sentence
Just like fear of the plague of the decay,
After all, we were next in line.

So no racist prejudice,
Just closer to your body- your own death.

On the black and white films of the documents
You can see our dehumanised faces.
Only, playing with a cut-off head,
SSman unveils his humane countenance.

His smile expresses free will
Of a being at the highest stage of development.
There is no way to not to be afraid of him- he is alive and beautiful, and decisively triumphant.
Who would dare to mark borders
Of his imagination and open omnipotence?

Because we would not.

The real victims
Still living with broken spine
In fight for scraps of justification.

It is hard to be surprised by our exasperation.

III

Me, who managed to take out from the ghetto
Sketches on the calendar's sheets
I know, how a life can be created
By an ordinary crayon in a faltering palm.

Dried-blood-coloured sanguine
Animates faces on paper
Eternaly hardened by dismay
That is drawing to end of the days.

And also a boy from tenment house
Like a terrified zigzag of hunger
With outspread claw he got
A ripe swede- the peak of bliss.

Sanguine is indefatigable:
Homeless Jew, before he dies
Carries children on hands
Verily, it is Holy Family.

And Kramsztyk shall die on stairs.
In a rush agonising painter.
He still saved the last treasure
When he handed me in a crayon's stub.

He was not under a delusion of faith in the wolrd anymore.
He knew New Yorks and Parises
Knowing that Death is only closer
He said
Draw people.