Venice masks

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Nighthawks: after Edward Hopper's painting - Wolf Wondratschek

It is night
and the city is deserted.

The lucky ones are at home,
or more likely
there are none left.

In Hopper’s painting, four people remain
the usual cast, so-to-speak:
the man behind the counter, two men and a woman.
Art lovers, you can stone me
but I know this situation pretty well.
Nighthawks - Edward Hopper

Two men and one woman
as if this were mere chance.
You admire the painting’s composition
but what grabs me is the erotic pleasure
of complete emptiness.

They don’t say a word, and why should they?
Both of them smoking, but there is no smoke.
I bet she wrote him a letter.
Whatever it said, he’s no longer the man
who’d read her letters twice.

The radio is broken.
The air conditioner hums.
I hear a police siren wail.
Two block away in a doorway, a junkie groans
and sticks a needle in his vein.
That’s how the part you don’t see looks.

The other man is by himself
remembering a woman,
she wore a red dress, too.
That was ages ago.
He likes knowing women like this still exist
but he’s no longer interested.

What might have been
between them, back then?
I bet he wanted her.
I bet she said no.

No wonder, art lovers,
that this man is turning his back on you.

Wolf Wondratschek (born 1943) Germany
Translated by Gerd Gemünden
Source: Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination by Gerd Gemünden, University of Michigan Press, 1998

4 comments:

  1. When is the date of publication of this poem? Is it 2013? I'm preparing my end of degree work and I have some doubts about it. Thank you!

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    Replies
    1. Hi, as far as I'm aware the original poem in German appeared in the author's book "Die Gedichte" published in 1992 by Diogenes Verlag, Zurich, but as this is a collected edition of his poems it was probably first published before that, possibly in his poetry heyday of the 1970s.

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    2. Hi, I cannot find the original version of the poem in German since the book is on Amazon an I need it for my University research. Could you please tell me if it is in another webpage? Thank you so much for your attention!

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    3. As far as I know there is no online version. You could probably pick it up 2nd hand from Abebooks or similar service.

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