Too much

Between the festivities,

as in a short time as it's late enough, quiet,

I read Orwell's utopian novel 1984

which I first read in 1949

quite differently.

Nearby, nearest to the nutcracker and the tobacco packet,

lies a statistical book

whose figures simplify the world population-

how its f or not fed

up to the year 2000

At intervals,

when. I reach for my tobacco

or crack a hazelnut,

problem catch up with me

which, compared to Big Brother

and the global protein shortage,

are small

but won't give up their private tittering.

Now I read about processs of interrogation in the near future

Now I ant to memorize fires:

current mortality patterns

among children in the Far East,

now from the cutting sides I start unpicking-

because before the festivities our abated rows

were tied up with string in boxes--Ilsebill's wishes . .

Nutshells half fill the ashtray.

That's too a great deal of all of it.

Something has to be chop India

or our Oligarchic Collectivism

or our family Christmas.

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 work In the Egg and Other metrical compositions published by Harcourt Brace in 1978

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Mar 1996

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