Hans Magnus Enzensberger

"favorite poems"

Shortcomings

No, I am not a patch
on the breakfast egg.
It is perfect.
Sometimes I regret
that compared to the power pylon
I vacillate.
The good-natured moss
disarms me
when I lust for revenge,
and the rhino’s thinking —
straightforward as it is —
I can only admire.
Verily, my screwdriver
will outlast my brain.
I am impressed by the ant,
the way it fumbles and fumbles
for a crack in the wall,
since I am lazy.
An attractive idea
to be soft of heart
like the fig, and selfless
like the light-bulb. Sorry,
oil and vinegar, pepper and salt,
I’m sorry that unlike you
I am dispensable.

Translated by the author

Discoverers

Sverdrup, da Cunha, d’Urville —
nobody knows who these madmen were
and what they were after
in doldrums, pack ice, rain forests:
cowrie shells? gold mines?
the Order of St. James of the Sword?

Drinking brackish water and rum
on shaky schooners
they lost their teeth.
Only their names are still rampant
like the rushes by the seashore, haunting us
for a century or two,
until they too will vanish
like all those who came before them
and left no trace,
not even their names in copperplate
on old sea-charts,
or their collarbones in the dunes.

Translated by the author

Hong Kong 1997

Have you seen the builders of this city,
illiterate acrobats climbing up skyhigh
on bamboo scaffolding?
Have you bought the cheapest jeans
and slept in the most expensive beds on earth?
Did you cough in the incense-filled temples
and smell the clouds of French perfume
hanging over the sewers?
Have you heard the clatter of gambling dens
and the roar at the stock exchange?
And the tourists, did you notice them
rubbing their eyes, exhausted from shopping,
like giant pink shrimps
behind tinted bus windows?

No. This town, in which a thousand flowers wither,
which has got over its Great Leap Forward
long ago, is beyond belief. It is a phantom,
a portent, a hallucination, a science-fiction opera,
a miraculous fake.

Translated by Anni Dyck