Amikor kihirdették a Panodyssey harmadik pályázatának nyerteseit, a Panodyssey két nagykövete, Deres Kornélia és Simon Márton is megerősítette a laudációjában, mennyire erős volt a mezőny - ezért nem is tíz, hanem 19 névből állt a shortlist. A harmadik helyezett Locker Dávid lett A stroboszkópos buli című versével. A pályamunkát Sipos Tímea fordításban most angolul is elolvashatod.
Dávid Locker: The Stroboscope Party
Translated by Tímea Sipos
Nothing is black-and-white –
is what our mothers and literary realism taught us.
And then we learned that everything is black and white.
We rejected extremes –
so we could cook their harvest into our pepper stew.
This is how we accidentally preserved them: mixing them together with the Hegel brand sour cream. Our tongues forgot the raw, rustic taste of homogeneity.
Complexity became the operative word.
Then the God of the Concept Cathedral.
If we liked the poem,
we didn’t call it beautiful, but complex.
This was the oil we anointed our poets with.
But some things are simply beautiful.
Seeing your favorite novel from adolescence
on the shelf of a used bookstore:
all that spills out of the sides,
once desperately, now a captivating
memory from long ago.
Waking up the day after Christmas at home:
the smell of coffee seeps in from the shining, lazy morning—
such that, for a brief moment, we forget
one or two confusing, tumultuous decades,
are grateful for winter break,
and that soon the matinee will commence.
Cliché sentences on a cliché Danube-side walk.
The carefree way we laugh at ourselves –
even though we know deep inside: the heart spoke the truth.
Kisses that rest on staircase landings.
The slow, cool drying of saliva on the skin after making love.
To look up at the sky on the way home.
Say what the Concept Cathedral clergy may,
God is present in these moments too.
From a certain perspective.
If I look at it from here, or there.
A and B
A and B
Black and white
Black and white
Black-and-white
Black-and-white
When did the mind become a stroboscope?
This is how we should
—if we’re working with what we’ve got—:
like the house party’s biggest idiot, drunk on dawn:
hit the red button.
And to watch how the quickening change from darkness to light
melts into one huge, pulsing glow.
That’s where we should, like the hero of a musical or a future apostle:
kneel down in front of some indivisible.
To stay like that, with a bowed head.
Until it dares appear from the corner,
and the Concept Language that keeps November dry,
it whispers slyly in our ear:
Your senses betrayed you.
Your heart betrayed you.