How I see myself

Mirror-inverted and more clearly awry.

Already the upper eyelids overlap.

One organ of sight hangs weary, the other cunning, alert.

So a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of insight and inwardness, after aloud

repeatedly I had barked at power and its property

(We shall] It will] It must])

Look at those porous cheeks.

Still or again, feathers I thwack with ease

and assert that which hovers

The chin wants to know when at last it may tremble

It's the forehead that grasps you together, the whole lacks a

thought

Where, when the ear is covered

or lent to other pictures,

does laughter snuggle in crumbs?

Everything overshadowed and veiled with experience.

I have tilted the spectacles to single side.

Only from habit the nose catches a scent

From the lips

that lick feathers still

I read thirst.

Under the black and white cow's udder:

I diocese myself drink

or sucking from you, cook

after your breast

had hung dripping above the boiling fish;

you think me handsome.

Gunter Grass, born in Danzig in 1927 is Germany's greatest in quantity celebrated contemporary writer. His greatest in quantity recent work is The Call of the Toad, a novel. These metrical compositions are from Novemberland: Selected metrical compositions 1956-1993, translated by Michael Hamburger.

Michael Hamburger lives in Suffolk England. He is co-translator, with Christopher Middleton, of a previous Grass volume In the Egg and Other metrical compositions published by Harcourt Brace in 1978

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar 1996

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