Translated by: Bartosz Wójcik

Roger Robinson “A Portable Paradise”

Thanks to Roger Robinson’s poems, we are not only observers of the world but are also placed at the very heart of events as they unfold. We take part in miniature genre scenes, backstage conversations about art, animals and the details of everyday life. We record manifestations of racism, class and economic violence, and cultural stereotypes, only to turn moments later to images of beauty, hope and cooperation. We encounter portraits of people – both victims of natural forces and human prejudice, and seekers of new identities, fulfilment and thrills. In Robinson’s poetry, a justified anger at injustice, cruelty, misogyny and chauvinism is combined with a subtle attempt to answer the question of whether, in today’s world, it is still possible to experience happiness, calm and liberation from the constraints imposed by systems, politics and discourses. Righteous anger often coexists with joy, the fervour of the manifesto with openness towards the Other, and the categorical nature of judgements about the present with faith in the power of the poem itself. Robinson, a poet and musician, excels at diversifying the structure of individual pieces, creating an extraordinary collage of short, quasi-documentary prose texts, brief anecdotes and notes, situational and narrative poems, ekphrases and snapshots, reworked poem sequences and intertextual allusions. The varied registers of this diction are allowed to resonate fully in Bartosz Wójcik’s translation, which interweaves spoken languages, overheard and caught in passing, and renders with a reporter’s precision the characteristics of people, objects and places, the momentum of individual stories, as well as moments that sparkle with unforced humour, allowing us to gain some distance from reality. A reality in which, as if in paradise, much is happening – absorbing, expressive and engaging – so there is no need to step away from it, even for a moment.

Jakub Kornhauser

 

The book was co- financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage  within the framework of Culture Promotion Fund.

Roger Robinson

ROGER ROBINSON (b. 1967) is a writer and musician born in London and raised in Trinidad. He is the co-founder of King Midas Sound, recording and touring internationally with the band as singer and lyricist. He has also recorded solo albums exploring minimalist electronica and dub (Jahtari Records). His poetry collection The Butterfly Hotel (2013) was shortlisted for the 2014 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His book A Portable Paradise (2019) won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in January 2020 and the Ondaatje Prize in May 2020. Robinson is also the co-author (with photographer and writer Johny Pitts) of Home is Not a Place (2022) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Photo by Matthew Thompson

Bartosz Wójcik

BARTOSZ WÓJCIK is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS), an organiser of cultural events, and member of the Polish Literary Translators Association. His texts have been published in Autoportret, Dialog, Dwutygodnik, Przekrój, and Wizje. Together with Jolanta Prochowicz, he edited the anthology Poetki na czasy zarazy (Women Poets for Times of Plague, WBPiCAK 2021). Alongside Olga Godlewska, he co-hosted the Podkast Zamorski (2022–2024), a series of discussions on literature from the Global South with a focus on the Caribbean and South America. He co-edited the anthology Dymy. Antologia tekstów slamerskich (Smokes: An Anthology of Slam Poetry, Dosłowne 2024) with Dagmara Świerkowska-Kobus and is a regular contributor to the quarterly Czas Literatury.

Photo by Helena Ganjalyan