I am not among them that are the first to wait for the dawns,

My night is long and the commitment is deep

Through it I learn how you can figure out life

If you see the world as a cat from an old window,

Disdainful and passionate

Versatile and lazy.

They are different from us,

We are apart from them,

Now even the air has borders.

We tremble of insecurity,

Will they maybe turn us back to where we came,

The land of the weak, the country of the week.

My pains become butterflies,

Your élan transforms in stone coating moss,

Where the Danube flows with the waltzes,

While we carry our ancestor’s spirits

In their songs full of sorrow.

Monumental streets, building massifs,

Everything so orderly that it obfuscates the eyes.

This is not our country, we perceive it

When we see the symmetrical domes and the reason of the objects,

When we climb gardened hills, on the road to the bastion,

The castles here are beautiful, not neglected.

The fastidiously detailed Gothic and the ecstasy of the senses,

Everything so pretty, as much as not to be ours.

Running bodies, athletic and sterile,

Not even our eyes are so fast,

We want to get what hides under the objects,

What keeps alive these museum-cities,

While our old shoes seep the rain.

The aristocracy and our cheap hotel,

The genius architect and our childish marvelling,

Art nouveau and the style’s influences –

We are used to see the things one by one,

So, in this orgy of senses, we lose concentration.

The synagogue between cathedrals and a basilica,

At night, in the catacombs of a cathedral mass is held,

While in the opposite synagogue jazz is played for the believers only.

And the streets start to fill with bodies,

The alehouses sell noise and foam,

Finally the stink of urine and vomit

The city starts to live, its skin reddens

As the sunny days would never be able to do it.

Where are the real faces, in what chairs the weariness is resting –

Is this maybe the flat monotony of happiness?

Everything is much simpler at ours,

The people are beautiful and the life is worthless.

We have come apart from them, we are obviously strangers,

We walk uncertainly, the rain has stopped,

The air is cloyed with the human whiff

The sweat and the mouth’s heat,

We are not impressed, further – plenty of lonely streets.

We choose the first of those,

We swallow the immense quietness,

The healthy chaos allowed by the city rules,

We are two hands clinging to the only thing they know.                            

Translated by Albion Zifla