“We pronounce our sentences like a whore makes love,” Kowalsky writes in the preface. “Our conversations are not conversations but promiscuity.” However, the importance of that project is not the project itself, although it is undeniable, as much as the fact that it was the forerunner of an even better Dictionary of Technology which will appear forty long years later. Kowalsky’s Dictionary was to be just the seed from which a powerful tree would sprout. And indeed, in 1981, a new Dictionary of Technology would appear in an edition of Vidici which would arouse considerable excitement. The disconcerted commentators of the daily papers interpreted the Dictionary as “an open invitation to destroy the social system,” although such invitations cannot be found on the pages of the Dictionaries. Soon thereafter, the secretive Analysis began to circulate in Belgrade, an unsigned text (probably from Masonic circles) in which a confused and malicious interpretation is given to the positions of the anonymous compilers of the Dictionary.
In 1943, the commandos of the Traumeinsatz picked up Kowalsky’s trail. Sensing the danger, Kowalsky disappeared from Stalać only an hour or two before the Gestapo knocked on the door of his room. On that foggy night, all trace is lost of him, though the rumors continued to spread. According to some, he showed up in Tibet where he dedicated himself to the study of the Book of the Dead; according to others, Kowalsky became a monk at the Hilandar monastery, taking on the name of Callistus; according to a third group, he was killed trying to escape. A witness, whom we cannot believe entirely, claimed that Joseph Kowalsky left in the middle of his watch, climbing onto a bicycle, he quickly disappeared into a cloud that enveloped him. Whatever happened, before us is a selection from the work of an interesting person, a selection that, let there be no doubt, should be given our full attention.
S. B.
Belgrade, 1983
POEMS
FELLOW TRAVELER
FOR GRETE
Fellow traveler
Pretend no innocence on this train, for
Thousands of years of my travels, no lady has there been.
They cheated you. Fancy fans and dances ride in first
class. Still it is wonderful to die between Budapest and
Stalać on 860 wheels between the beams of light
And the imposing bottom of some gentlewoman who soon
Gets off rhythm at a station with an unclear name and slips
Into the ear of the dispatcher.
Perchance I will love you for fifty, perchance even all one hundred miles
Indescribably heading east together with a gentleman
Who, there you see, brought his daughter along for a vacation
Into death. Fellow traveler, pretend no innocence.
Who knows if we shall reach the coast.
The sea is as large as the sadness in your eyes
And deep within me. The sun will rise between your thighs
For a change while we travel at once in all eleven
directions of the world. Love affairs are unreasonably brief
In the twinkle of an eye — there’s the station where you get off.
Tell him
That I won’t come
(1919)
YOU DIDN’T COME
I think you didn’t come.
You wanted to because it was Sunday.
You put on your skin, pulled on your hands, put on your feet and
Went down the stairs but the Amebas had moved the streets
Crisscrossed them, changed their names, hidden the things
that could have served as azimuths.
You wandered about with a smile on which
the zipper broke
Night had long since fallen and you no longer knew where you were.
You even forgot where you had actually been going and me and the only thing
you wanted was to arrive somewhere from
the omnipresent nowhere.
Around midnight the Amebas grew tired of their game and they once again
put the streets back where they belonged and so you once again found
the entrance to your flat — exhausted and aged…
You lay in bed crying
And just before dawn
Became an Ameba yourself.
(1919)
~ ~ ~
…
I haven’t slept all night long. I don’t know if she
slept a hundred meters further down in a room from which
the veinal blood of the lampshade ran onto the sidewalk.
To comfort myself, I dreamt that I was dead. And then,
before daybreak, a vague foreboding shook me from my sleep.
It was hard, lonely, like a sweaty stoker
shoveling coal into the furnace of a locomotive from which
the dispatchers turn their gaze, pretending to rub the eye
of the lamp of the rail-switch and pretending that they
saw nothing
(1919)
(Spring version of the poem You Didn’t Come)
SCANDAL
Two eyelids swollen from insomnia.
Tears drop into the fine yellow dust, at first
One by one and then in crystal streams
That write hieroglyphs on the ground.
Suddenly, the city begins to fall
On the hunching shoulders and filthy children try
With fistfuls of mud to plug those treacherous
Those scandalous eyes.
The tears want out into the street.
But the other way round: the streets, following the tracks of the tears,
Gently crawl into the tear ducts. Beside the city and here now
The street and the evening plunge down upon the shoulders. Not likely
That they will hold up much longer, but they hold.
Came into being long before this city
These streets
Before themselves.
Only then does it vanish. Becoming smaller and smaller. It disappears,