Tim Kercher
englisch
C’est la vie
Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
de cuatro a dos a tres, del río a la mar,
play the fool, suffer school, żunżana ddur iddur,
engage-toi, perds ta foi, le regole imparar,
kul u sum, aħra u bul, chase the moon, meet your doom,
walk on ice, roll your dice, col destino danzar,
métro, boulot, dodo, titla’ x-xemx, terġa’ tqum,
decir siempre mañana y nunca mañanar,
try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone,
sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home,
fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,
che sarà? ça ira! plus rien de nous sera,
minn sodda għal sodda niġru tiġrija kontra l-baħħ,
sakemm tinbela’ ruħna mill-ġuf mudlam tal-art
Aus: Mużajk. An Exploration in Multilingual Verse
Edizzjoni Skarta, 2008
Audioproduktion: Literaturwerkstatt Berlin 2009
On How A City Gets Published Each Day
They start working at dawn, the proofreaders and city stylists.
They mow the lawns,
paint the facades of buildings,
reconnect broken cables,
read the streets line by line
like professionals:
this dog should not be here, let’s take it off;
let’s add a newsstand between these two trees,
and down there, at the end of the street
a trash can should be placed but
let’s change the street name.
Right there we need to correlate a supermarket with its original text—
citations from American life,
those the city just recently approved.
Frankly, many tasks wait to be done,
but not out of weakness.
Every morning there’s a steady diligence;
they stick their noses in the dusty volumes and
do their never-ending jobs:
replace the street tiles,
re-paint billboards in accordance with each holiday,
hang the street signs
and, finally, bring this stylistically corrected
city to the Night Editor for publishing.