Um judeu alemão (poema de Hans Magnus Enzensberger, trad M Hamburger)

karl heinrich marx

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

gigantic grandfather

jehovah-beardedon

brown daguerrotypes

i see your face in the snow-white aura

despotic quarrelsome

and your papers in the linen press:

butcher's bills

inaugural addresses

warrants for your arrest

your massive body

i see in the "wanted" book

gigantic traitor

displaced person

in tail coat and plastron

consumptive sleepless

your gall-bladder scorched

by heavy cigars

salted gherkins

laudanum and liqueur

i see your house

in the rue d'alliance

dean street grafton terrace

gigantic bourgeois

domestic tyrant

in worn-out slippers:

soot and "economic shit" *

usury "as usual" *

children's coffins

backstair calamities

no machine-gun

in your prophet's hand:

i see it calmly

in the british museum

under the green lampbreak

up your own house

with a terrible patience

gigantic founder

for the sake of other houses

in which you never woke up

gigantic zaddik

i see you betrayed by your disciples:

only your enemies remained what they were:

I see your face on the last picture of april eighty-two:

an iron mask:

an iron mask of freedom*

Quotations from Marx's letters to Engels in the 1850s and 1860s.