Enzensberger at Exiles Bookshop


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These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, ISBN 0 86806 029 1, paperback.

At the back of the bookshop a Karate expert

keeps a pot of coffee brewing, in the window

a man exhibits his bandages and the lights

flash red, amber, blue; all night long

the sex magazine quiz gets filled in.

What am I doing here? That cloud layer

threatens nothing, and speaks casually

of a distant beach; everybody's laughing . . .

they trained beautiful men and women

to meet me at the airport, they

follow me around and buy me lunch,

they point out the misfits and the deviants

and keep me amused at parties where young men

fight and make up like emotional Brownshirts.

In Martin's Bar the topless waitresses

are all sober, their perfectly matched tits

jump at the drunks while upstairs

a poet listens to the race results,

next door at The Balkan a cloud of burnt fat

gushes up the ventilator; these

are the good times, Australian style,

this has become a new vernacular

and waits for my Adler to turn it into German.

Europe is a ruined Paradise buried under

books; here, nothing important was promised.

I'm drinking coffee and writing

in English on a piece of crumpled paper;

soon I'll learn the native dialect and ask

Where are the ovens? Is it true that you never

learned to kill each other? Are you happy?

Notes:
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, b.1929, Germany's leading poet and political essayist. Four recent poems and a photograph can be found in Issue #3 of Jacket magazine. Mr Enzensberger visited Exiles Bookshop (now defunct) in Sydney's Taylor Square, though after this poem was written.
The cover photo for Dazed in the Ladies Lounge is of John Tranter and Lyn Grady (later Lyn Tranter) at the 1964 Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children Nurses' Graduation Ball at Sydney's Menzies Hotel, Wynyard Square.


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