Gunter Kunert
Witchcraft, Texas Style
Hands turned into clumps
by magic fire from the sky.
Children, amazed, after they’ve healed,
hold their brand-new, their forever
useless fingers up to their eyes:
can’t figure out what’s
happened to us because of the big speeches
of the big grownups, children, and their abracadabra
in front of the mikes, where
a wrinkle-browed President
conjures up peace, children, and with a mournful
look a ghost called “Fer-reedum”:
a modern-day Merlin,
richer than anybody, who can do anything
except for one small thing:
burned children stay branded.
Keep away from falling fire, the water
carrying conquerors along, and
the Magna Carta of Human Rights:
a belated draught from Jean Jacques’s
guts.
Günter Kunert is, at seventy-one, one of the grand old men of German literature. A native Berliner who left East Germany in 1979, he has published over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose, of which the most recent are his memoirs, Erwachsenenspiele (Adult Games) and a collection of verse, Nacht Vorstellung (Late Show), both in 1999. ‘Witchcraft, Texas Style’ first appeared in Warnung vor Spiegeln (Watch out for Mirrors, 1970), and the other two poems here are from Mein Golem (My Golem, 1996).
Gerald Chapple teaches German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and has been translating German and Austrian writers for twenty years. Apart from Kunert’s poetry, his latest (co-)translation is Barbara Frischmuth’s Chasing after the Wind: Four Stories, which was awarded an Austrian Government translation prize in 1996.
Günter Kunert's poems: © Hauser Verlag, Munich.
Translated by Gerald Chapple
Page(s) 92
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