by Günter Grass
What Bird Was Brooding Here?
Lost feathers waver
over the empty nest,
which stroke by stroke
I shape into a riddle.
Letters
fade in the archive, whisper, moan, sigh with desire, murmuring the old eternal litany. Celebrations too, threats, boring stuff simply marking time. And questions hungering for answers: Why? How? What for? No one remembers what it was all about. Guilt reckoned forward and backward, shoved back and forth.
Stamped letters, each bearing a date. A lengthy correspondence. A thief’s fingerprint: private affairs now babble in public.
Lots of ordinary mail: acceptances, regrets, postponing something till later. A letter or two I shouldn’t have written, others less abrupt, with no forced wit or wordy silence. This one I could still sign with all best wishes. And this one was never answered.
In the old days, mail was private. The mailman was one of the family; you waited for him. Conversations between the door and the doorjamb: How are the children, and the wife? The dog was glad when he arrived.
Nowadays there’s seldom a letter among the junk mail, and almost never a handwritten one, one worth rereading.
Soon we will have nothing more to say to each other. No secrets between the lines or implied in a hand that trembles—unless mail arrives on its own, tenderly written in the sand at low tide.
Libuše My Love
Don’t be so hard on yourself,
as if you’d been trapped
and sealed in amber.
Since you passed away
I’ve been following your trail,
traced only with lost words.
Recently I went looking for the castle
and found it in Bohemia.
You’d given orders
for diligent restorers
to renew its façades
on all sides.
They hadn’t finished back then,
they’re still at it today,
and they will be tomorrow.
Because it crumbles, cracks appear,
mold swells the plaster, withers its bright skin,
on the weather side first.
It comforts me, their toil,
for I too loved you
on all sides, in vain.
Where His Humor Fled
Having lost my way, as in a garden maze, in the Life of Quintus Fixlein—or was it the jubilees of Titan?—I was shown the right path by the helpful double star of Siebenkäs and The Awkward Age—a path on which, I note in passing, a card catalogue of never-ending wit waylaid me with tears of laughter—and arrived at a Biedermeier-style literary circle where a gathering of demurely coiffed maidens and overripe matrons were enjoying the flower pieces of the Wunsiedel native, sharing the love they felt in common for the manic wordsmith; at which point I managed, with a bold leap through time—a technique I’d copied from Giannozzo the Balloonist—to escape into the present, where, in spite of a flood of images and the constant noise, life seemed dry and barren. Only serious matters, with no room for humor, seemed to count. Everything had its price, or could be had cheaply at a closeout sale, and the Introductory School of Aesthetics had been shut down to save money; thrice barred, the door turned me away.
The abundant spirit that flows from his books will soon be remaindered. Who drove him out, along with his rich vocabulary? I suspect his humor fled to lands created by his sinuous sentences, fueled by excerpts gathered throughout his life, as nesting spots for cuckoo eggs. I watch him as he watches himself hatch them.
In the Rollwenzelei Inn
As he drinks his daily beer
swallow by swallow,
all the idolizing women—
except for the protective hostess—
having vanished into the blue,
Jean Paul looks over his own shoulder
as he writes,
writing as he does,
about how, as he writes,
he’s looking over his own shoulder.
In that fat, bulging body
shivers a sensitive soul
thirsting for something
for which beer, swallow by swallow,
is a quickly vanishing substitute.
A Late-Night Visit
The weariness that overcomes me by day, which I dismiss with a sneer or an ironic smile as a senile urge to flee back to bed, is actually a gift granted by old age, for the moment sleep turns its back on me, around three or four in the morning—when darkness darkens, to paraphrase Quirinus Kuhlmann—having tossed and turned till I’m thoroughly awake, I flee to my den, its walls shored up with books, and profit from the time, the time now running short, to scribble on blank paper or open the door to encounters of a special kind.
Just last night someone knocked at the door, a scholar of myth who was already ancient in his lifetime. He brought with him a gift of rolled tobacco from India. As we smoked, the conversation soon turned to The Flounder. Decades late, I offered him an apology: I was indebted to his masterpiece The Raw and the Cooked for its references to pre-Columbian notions of the origin of fire, and to the cunning theft that finally brought humankind the gift of soup, joints roasted on the spit, and warmer winters, but led as well to the invention of deadly weapons.
He smiled at my version of a tale he himself had discovered, in which a three-breasted Aua hides a small burning ember stolen from the divine Jaguar—an old wolf in my story—in her vulva, leaving behind a permanent scar that constantly itches; he smiled too at my great-grandmother’s assault on the heavenly fire, over which she squats pissing until, hissing and fading, it goes out; and forgave me for having failed to name as my source of inspiration both him and those arduous field trips into the rainforests of the tristes tropiques where he lived with what native tribes remained.
It was no doubt politeness that led him to say how much my rewriting of the legends he had collected flattered him. The glowing ember in the vulva, he said, offered a vivid image of the transition from the raw to the cooked. He hoped I would go on creating variants. There were still many tales to tell. He knew other myths open to diverse interpretations.
When I replied that I was too old to do so, and felt unfit to work on anything in prose—except for a few scraps near the bottom of the barrel—the one-hundred-and-one-year-old scholar strongly disagreed. He took me sharply to task: Only the written word counts! And when I abruptly changed the subject and began discussing current problems in Franco-German relations, he just started murmuring in Indic languages. My late-night guest departed in silence.
After Endless Torment
up and out of bed
to clear with a sharp pencil
the flickering void;
that’s what we gain in old age:
sleep is a waste of time.
And Then Came Xaver
Yesterday’s storm had a name too, as others before it; as part of a series it would provide statistics, be of service to science, sum up total damage.
But this time—my notebook tells me—there was less destruction, although the storm surge on the coast was higher than in ’sixty-two, boosting the stock of companies that lend out guardian angels for a fee and insure all the small homeowners against the moods of an increasingly outraged Nature.
According to the Weather Report
there are floods in the south,
while the north is drying out.
Tourists are fleeing here from there
and suing the climate for damages.
Still Life
Atop the rotting windfall,
the storm recently tossed
the last apples and pears
and what remained of the leaves,
changing their color for my pen’s pleasure,
and curling their edges.
A Lingering Aftertaste
Amid the winter-muffled crowd shoving their way along as if lost in a dream from stand to stand at the Lübeck Christmas Fair, among children pausing before sidesho
w displays of fairy tales filled with figurines, while my grandchildren and I were nibbling freshly roasted almonds, I was suddenly overcome by a feeling that had no apparent cause, unless sweets were suspect by nature.
It drained all sense and meaning from everything that claimed to exist, even the colossus of the cathedral thrusting into the dark sky. I nevertheless managed, with the shrewdness of old age, to disguise by false cheerfulness the weight that threatened to paralyze me; for half a century earlier, at the request of the city of Nuremberg, I had composed a speech entitled “Progress at a Standstill,” which moved from past to present, focusing on Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving Melancholia I and the Coal Adjustment Act.
Ever since then I’ve known for certain that what is inadequately described as melancholy, and medically diagnosed as depression, forms part of my makeup. It affects humans and no doubt other animals. The gloom that accompanies it darkens things, but also grants insight, illuminates depths. Without it there would be no art. It’s the quagmire in which I seek a foothold. It even provides an undercoat for humor. It holds an hourglass up to love, which sees only itself. The clock was invented to oblige it. Wherever progress claims to be making great strides, even with regard to what remains of Nature—or as today, in the midst of the Christmas Fair—it is present; melancholy overwhelms us for a time.
Even the childen—so it seemed—appeared slightly lost in the midst of their laughter, if only for one long moment. Then they were asking for things again, wanting things, this time a gingerbread heart.
Roasted Almonds
From milk-teeth
to old age the smell
lures us from afar.
In paper cones
that keep them warm
in spite of winter’s cold,
they gradually disappear,
but you can still taste them
when the pious scenes
of the Christmas Fair
have long been cleared.
Thus do old men turn to children
who never get enough.
They’re always nibbling on something.
When My Sense of Taste
and Smell Deserted Me
Who pulled the rug out from under my feet? Who denied the Yes still inside me? I’ve visited various places for the last time. Cities, landscapes, friends far away. Nothing I pick up proves easy to handle these days. Empty drawers. It’s time to practice my farewell.
Oh, go on! Those are just passing moods. So much that’s new, still untasted, clambers over the horizon, cries out to be stared at, touched, used. It’s all right to be amazed again. Every time our nose twitches, some new invention comes along to perform miracles we’ve only dreamed of. But now they are real; they create reality.
Why would anyone want to leave now? Why say farewell when everything that’s ever been, is, or will be comes swimming into view through a new type of glasses? Now in a single instant we were, are, and will be. Welcome, not farewell, infuses all writing with light.
Think back, which should be easy enough. A few years ago, when your sense of taste and smell deserted you, when cheese no long tasted like cheese, pickles weren’t sour, cherries weren’t sweet, lilacs and elders bloomed in vain, and bread was cardboard, a god in immaculate white came to your aid with shots and round pills. And suddenly fish and sausages, radishes and carrots, all regained their own special taste, their own distinct smell, to which you’d been prepared to say farewell forever. Farewell to spring potatoes and pears in the fall. Farewell to dill, rosemary, and sage. Farewell to all odors, your own familiar fug, your own farts.
Farewell to the Flesh
I sing the woman’s body, sing its praises,
slim to slender, in rounded fullness—
the likeness of a goddess carved in marble—
yet soon to be wrinkled, veined with blue,
as the seeking hand, still tender
and knowing, feels the bones, counts the little ones,
as if bidding farewell
to a skin once taut and smooth,
now dry and withered.
I sing of you, twin breasts,
who, when still young, fill fumbling hands,
when ripe are double pillows
on which to bed unease,
and when full, the kind sucking men
call tits, are well worn,
gleaming with sweat,
and licked by fear—
lumps might grow, cancer . . .
Slack, hanging bags—
Half full, half empty—
still recalling
how fully they once swelled,
I praise you all, all breasts
to which I clung: sucking, never sated,
exhausted, close to tears,
quiet, quiet at last;
or fallen into sadness
that knows only
the urge to be alone,
a man alone and sad.
Soon hoarse, I sing of you,
vulva, snatch, cunt,
snail in its shell,
my refuge since youth;
a spring now sealed.
Farewell to the firm ass
that out of the angled slope of the back
rounds its two cheeks
as if rising—the sun, the sun!
Farewell to hair, the thicket
I flounder in, caught.
Farewell to hands in constant search
of the undiscovered hollow,
the rest stop, the dew-covered moss,
the hole in the hedge.
That leaves the arms and legs,
those legs, those arms, wrapped around me
for thousands of years.
Farewell to the open mouth,
that welcoming cave, the play of tongues
that knows no rules, sufficient unto itself.
Farewell to the slow plunge,
the primal sound, when suddenly
what’s left of the animal
awakens with a groan, whimpers,
till the cry—dully, then swelling,
driven to its peak—the cry
rises and rises . . .
Farewell to flesh that lies hidden,
wrapped in wool, velvet, taffeta,
in rough linen.
Too many buttons, a zipper that’s stuck,
cloth over cloth in flowers and stripes,
and beneath it all, silk—black or white—
till at last the body
lies peeled and naked,
still closed, womanly,
yet barely touched,
becomes the breathing flesh I sing,
I praise since Adam, and we are as one,
as it is written.
All my life, still felt in dreams,
love charm and manna.
Flesh from which I was born,
born hungry for more;
no, no pinup,
no airbrushed flesh
rosily promising everyone
it will last forever.
In Nature’s given form,
as sung, as praised by me,
body surrounded forever by whispers of love,
to which, when still, my pen
gives outline,
follows its rounded curves,
forms hills and—past all horizons—
levels and smooths out all.
Casting shadows,
revealing landscapes
constantly new, chastely empty,
each one different.
A farewell that finds no end,
a song that never dies—
Ah, my dear, most dearly loved!—
into what shell, what ear,
murmured on the beach.
Verse upon verse,
receding softly, advancing strongly,
then monotone and nearly still,
till far from all flesh
the body turns to stone.
Stacked Lumber
On a Sunday family excur
sion through the Oliva Forest, heading for Freudental and an inn where long tables awaited us with soft drinks, coffee, and streuselkuchen, I see the compact figure of my paternal grandfather, a self-employed carpenter, as he pauses suddenly and stands in thought before a tall smooth-barked tree.
His gaze travels up and down the trunk. Nodding appreciatively, he sounds the bark. More to himself than to his patient family, he estimates how many meters of lumber the beech will yield.
Signs point the way. Slowy the family moves on. We can’t possibly get lost. Grandfather pauses once again, takes measurements. A cuckoo may have called.
After the war, during which his workshop turned from making furniture to outfitting barracks, he sat on his packed suitcase as a deportee. He sat facing east, a displaced person believing firmly in Chancellor Adenauer’s promise: he would be going home soon.
He was sure down to the last detail: the carpentry shop would be waiting for him, the supply of door and window frames he’d left behind, the friendly tools, the circular saws and bandsaws, the transformer and the planer, the lumber stacked under tarpaper in the woodshed.
My grandfather kept hoping till the day he died in Lüneberg.
Xenophobia
As millions of displaced persons
with little luggage,
burdened by memory,
were forcibly resettled
in what remained of the fatherland,
many of the locals, feeling cramped
by their arrival, shouted:
Go back where you came from!
But they stayed, as did
the well-worn cry: Go, get out!
Soon it was aimed at foreigners