Marcin Malek

Marcin Malek (born 24.02.1975, in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Published mainly in quarterlies: „Fronda”, „Tygiel Kultury”, „Akcent” and monthlies: „Nowe Państwo”, „Stosunki Międzynarodowe”, „Opcja na prawo”. Winner of the annual award of "Poetry&Paratheatre" journal (category: poem of the Year) for year 2012, (work: „Bieg – Czyli list do współczesnych”/"Run – a letter to the present"). Since 2006 lives and works in Ireland.

Quotes from literary works

From The Fall of Jeremiah Grant

The Fall of Jeremiah Grant: An Irish Tragedy in Five Acts " . Publisher ‏ : ‎Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8288084324, ASIN: B0FD858XN4, Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

'A man's pride is a good coat, but a poor meal."

"It is not about the hives anymore, Anna. Do you not see that? It is about whether we are people or cattle. It is about whether we live on our knees or stand on our feet."

From The Mourner's Wake

The Mourner's Wake: Irish Folklore Dark Comedy in four Acts. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8287695057, ASIN: B0FCSQZ882 Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"It's not a story you tell. It's a story you're part of, whether you know it or not."

"What is identity, after all, but the story we agree to stop questioning?"

From An T-ocras

An T-ocras. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, March 1, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8319442819, ASIN: B0CW1FHZ8V Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"They say that time is the ultimate culprit, when it comes to all tragedy, but clearly they’re wrong. It’s a comforting thing to blame—time—easy to curse and impossible to question. But there are happenings far older than time, far deeper than any tick or tally the world has since assigned. Tragedy, real tragedy, did not wait for clocks or calendars. No. It unfolded before time had even laced up its boots, before memory had teeth, before the world had a name for itself"

"Stories, even those clenched between molars or drowned in bogwater, endure by accumulating. They congeal in the air like smoke that remembers the flame."

"It was the kind of sorrow that makes your molars ache."

From The Mills Kept Grinding

The mills kept grinding. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, August 25, 2021, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8463763839, ASIN : B09DMXTHMR Lyrics Editorial House 2021". Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"He saluted and moved towards the dark line of troves. The forest, like a living organism, swallowed one by one the men who, wolflike had chosen life in the pack, relying on the overwhelming call of blood, on the eternal hunger for freedom and death as close as a wife herself in the middle of a sleepless night."

"I am the necessary evil, Holger. I am the one who does what must be done, so that men like you can pretend you are still good. I am the darkness that allows your light to seem so bright. You need me, whether you know it or not. We all need a monster to blame, so we can sleep at night."

"We are unique for we kill while feeling something akin to mercy and regret. We are able to pull the trigger, thinking of the unfortunate mother of the boy who is about to die, even though we understand that he has a wife and children, that just yesterday he was a happy civilian, going to the movies, sitting in the café, taking his son and daughter to the amusement park, and that he had a good and happy life which we are about to take."

"There are no more good people in this world, nor honest ones. There are only us and look what we're doing? We bathe in each other's blood, we nourish ourselves in our neighbor's pain and anguish, and if we can afford a human response, we do it out of a need to distinguish ourselves from others, to remind ourselves that we were once what you talk so beautifully about."

From The Peculiar Incidents of Zacharie Blanchard

The Peculiar Incidents of Zacharie Blanchard: Book I – Crooked Hill's Dern . Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8285744047, ASIN: B0FB9GDNBM Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"Even the most incredible tale holds a grain of truth, for every truth shall at some point grow into an incredible tale."

"And what if indifference, shepherd, what if that is the only effective remedy for a truth so terrible, so heavy, it makes everyone who bears it ill? No, it is not the lie, but the truth, that often kills hope!'"

From Where the Maps End

Where the Maps Ends: A Life Threaded Through Forty Literary Lectures . Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8287715984, ASIN:B0FCSKTQSK Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"We forget the simple, profound truth that they were people. People who burned the toast, who feared the dentist, who felt the first chill of autumn and wondered if they had enough firewood."

"The city, in this light, emerges as a potent double-edged sword: it provides the space and freedom for transgression and self-fulfillment, but also the conditions for profound isolation and the stark realization of one's vulnerability in the face of overwhelming societal forces."

From A lifetime of questions in Thirty and One Literature Lectures

A lifetime of questions In Thirty and One Literature Lectures . Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, November 11, 2024, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8346271529, ASIN : B0DMSZLY75 Lyrics Editorial House 2024". Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"There's something both terrifying and beautiful in this, for every time someone reads our poetry, they're not just seeing our vision. No, they're experiencing a strange, uneasy blending, a hybrid of two minds-ours and theirs, melding and shifting."

"As I read these books, I hear the echoes of my own family, their lives marked by the same brutal histories, the same unyielding resilience. They, like Solzhenitsyn and Herling-Grudziński, knew what it was to survive in a world stripped bare of justice."

From A Drawer Full of Wonders

A Drawer Full of Wonders. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, November 12, 2024, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8285744047, ASIN : B0DMW8X2PH Lyrics Editorial House 2024". Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"But mind yerselves, young and old alike; this is no ordinary drawer filled with socks and forgotten pennies. No, this is A Drawer Full of Wonders, where each story breathes and sighs like the wind off the Cliffs of Moher, and each page carries a little spark of the unknown."

"The magic, he realized, wasn't just in the drawer or even in the forest itself. No, the true magic lay in the heart, in the wonder and the dreams he carried."

From No Rest for the Dead in Portlaoise

No Rest for the Dead in Portlaoise: Dark Comedy in five Acts. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8287585709, ASIN: B0FCN1MLJ7 Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"This town… it’s built on a foundation of convenient forgetting. Of looking the other way. Maybe that’s the only way it survives. Maybe that’s the ‘curse’ Finnegan and the rest were so afraid of. Not some supernatural hex, but the curse of their own complicity. Our own complicity."

"Secrets are like good whiskey, Inspector-best savoured in small, judicious doses, lest they rise up and burn you from the inside out."

From Facies Hippocratica

Facies Hippocratica: A Grim Tragedy in Four Acts. Publisher Lyrics Editorial House, 2025, Portlaoise. ISBN 979-8288183553, ASIN: B0FD8VBRW6, english Edition, Lyrics Editorial House 2025. Published under pen name Martin Smallridge

"Am I what you imagine me to be? Perhaps, though beyond your everyday understanding. I am observer, judge. I live within a realm of seeing, gathering shadows to scatter them again as light."

"To write, to make something out of words well, it's nothing but a paradox dressed up in good intentions. Every line's a letting go, an admission that you're only half in control of the thing you're conjuring."

"Because the truth this play whispers, without pity or cruelty, is this: the darkness is not hollow. It is full. It is not the end. It is the passage."

Among the things (2012) by Marcin Malek

• HERE

"above Dublin

below a skyline aflame

with white dwarfs’ blazing fires

a hushed town

gazes into the distance

and wanes like an agate stone

that sleeps amongst sharp reeds

in cloudy waters of the ford

longing for its soul."

• • Source: Page 18-20, verse V
  • Originally written in English

• 1916

"Let us lift the fallen!

Because who else – who else than we

would summon them like autumn leafs

when time will shake the bells of our dreams

a “Foggy dew”

And once the time runs out

for everything and nothing at all

with a triumphant song on our lips

we shall wage war on the entire world!"

• • Source: Page 38, verse V,VI.
  • Notes: Originally written in English

• "SINN"

"We are the anthems, trumpets

long-maned waves and roaring seas

we are the heavy columns of clouds

and eager sharp granite fangs

we are the yellow sands

that marble moon, grey dust

a stone’s shadow as hard as tears

of river streams and famine time

we boundless days, empty nights

blood on the threshold, iris of guns

hangman's ropes and trenches –

of gaping hollow graves"

• • Source: Page 42, verse I-III.
  • Notes: Originally written in English. „Sinn”: In Gaelic means "We". Poem was created in response to an appeal of fellow Irishman, who ask to wrote something in kind of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's "Ode", maintaining similar styling. (footnote from page 42)

• A SPRING

"Long stalks of rain

are growing from the skies

down towards ash-black soil,

softer than deer hearts

frozen in concentration

at river banks

Everything that is not here

lies beyond these waters – more effusive

than a fisherman’s song,

when come evening time

they sail back to theirs rocky homes

settled at Shannon’s ridges

winding like a maggot in a downpour

and greener still

than eyes of women

that bear the same name"

• • Source: Page 56, verse I-II.
  • Notes: Originally written in English

Diary of an unfinished journey (2012) by Marcin Malek

• A CARE

"Your shadow –

Looks nothing like you

She said passing me by

I pass her by with no regrets

My shadow is my care –

I said

I’m of Darkness –

And Darkness is of me

If you know the place –

where it comes from?

She looked over her shoulder

Only a man She said

Only man – all over the place

wanders along his own steps"

• • Source: Page 86, verse I-II.
  • Notes: Originally written in English

• THE ODIUM

"Did you know,

that lack of touch

sometimes hurts more

than a strike?"

• • Source: Page 134, the whole piece
  • Notes: Originally written in English

Non-English quotes

• ÉIRE

"Gdybym był alfą i omegą w jednym

nie umiałbym kochać cię bardziej niż teraz

niedojrzała ojczyzno zbłąkanych złudzeń

Wystarczy, że chodzę po twojej ziemi

i piję z twoich źródeł"

• ÉIRE (translation)

"If I were the alpha and omega all at once

I could not love you more than now

Immature motherland of stray illusions

I'm grateful to feel your soil

and quench my thirst on your rivers"

• • Source: Call me an idiot (2012) by Marcin Malek (pages 13-14, the whole piece)

• TYM BARDZIEJ

"Uparty człowieku

im bardziej łakniesz światła

tym bardziej diabeł się cieszy"

• THE MORE (translation)

"Stubborn little man

the more light you desire

the more devil rubs his hands"

• • Source: Call me an idiot (2012) by Marcin Malek (pages 22, the whole piece)

• ZABAWA

"Rankiem nad rzeką bawiły się dzieci

Przybyli mężczyźni

W południe rzeka bawiła się dziećmi"

• TRIFLE

"On early morn children were playing at the river’s shore

close to the noon soldiers came out of the blue

by the dim river red played theirs sins."

• • Source: Call me an idiot (2012) by Marcin Malek (pages 41, the whole piece)

References

• Marcin Malek Among the things, Publisher. Miniatura, Krakow 2012. (Bilingual book Polish/English) ISBN 9788376063416, pages 18,38,42,56.
• Marcin Malek Diary of an unfinished journey, Publisher. Miniatura, Krakow 2012.(Bilingual book Polish/English) ISBN 9788376063775, pages 86, 134.
• Marcin Malek Call me an idiot, Publisher. Miniatura, Krakow 2012. ISBN 9788376064406, pages 13,14, 22, 41.
• National Library of Poland