L I t T e R

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Günter Kunert


Northern Summer

Brightness into the night. Enough
light to read the paper by. But even
the light asks: what is the point
of doing this any more?
In the middle of a moderate
landscape
stretching out without mountains
clearly more likely to be
the home of villages. Now
above one of them, late,
our central star,
quite unnaturally fixed there
for collectors of postcards:
giant and red.
If only there was time
for a slower sunset.

(From ‘Fremd daheim’ / 'Foreign at Home', 1990)




Collage

The clocks spun much too fast.
A new Antediluvian age
has dawned and the darkness
is tangible. I can still see myself
in the mirror looking
at my belly,
which is guilty: that’s why
I call it “Deathdrum.”
While the ages quickly yellow
behind my back –
the old days like wallpaper –
I think of my planetary housemates
with leniency.
The old mythical creatures
are no more
the new ones are already like dust
to which words speak
to no avail.

(From Mein Golem, 1996)




Reading Ovid

There’s a secret resting
under every stone. Kept
by woodlice, descendants
of our ancestors.
Successful metamorphoses
that Ovid kept quiet about. The Gods, too,
have got smaller with time.
Some of them now, when they show themselves,
are only as big as the span of a hand. They wander
across the screens both westwards
and eastwards, in no fixed direction
and quite lost. But they still
rock the structure of the world
put together with so much trouble.
They look down on me and you,
the guardians of the secrets,
without their knowledge. Our stony silence
is grey and obedient.

(From Nachtvorstellung / 'Evening Performance', 1999)





Copyright © Günter Kunert, 2009
Translation © copyright Alistair Noon, 2009