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Hans Magnus Enzensberger

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Lighter than air

Poems don’t carry
very much weight.
As long as the tennis ball rises
it is, or seems to me to be
lighter than air.

Helium in any case,
inspiration, this itch
inside our brains,
St Elmo’s fire too
and natural numbers.

They weigh next to nothing,
not to speak of
the transcendental ones,
their upper-class cousins,
although they are numberless.

As far as I know, this holds
good for the radiation of magnets
which we do not see,
for most haloes
and all waltz tunes without exception.

Lighter than air,
like a grief forgotten
and the bluish smoke
of the finally last cigarette,
is our self, of course,

and, as far as I know,
the burnt offering’s odour
so pleasing to the gods
always rises heavenward.
So does a Zeppelin.

A great many things, in any case,
remain in suspense.
Lightest of all perhaps
weighs that which remains of us
when we’ve gone underground.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in Bavaria in 1929 and grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. Generally considered the most important of contemporary German poets, he is a social and cultural critic and a political thinker whose satire has informed his poetry as well as his essays. His 1995 collection, Kiosk (translated by Michael Hamburger and published by Bloodaxe in 1997), is reviewed in this issue by Richard Dove.

Michael Hamburger, poet and doyen of translators from German, contributed translations of Günter Grass to MPT 13; MPT 2 (a bilingual issue) was devoted to his translations of unpublished poems by Franz Baermann Steiner. His translation of a poem by WG Sebald appears in this issue. The poems here are taken from Leichter als Luft, Moralische Gedichte (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1999).

Translated by Michael Hamburger

Page(s) 95-96

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