There's no such thing as free verse, because
as long as you write poems you're enslaved,
the simple fact is you are never free,
subject as you are to the rules of language,
the form and making of poems being as much
an act of slavery as the performance of the juggler
who ends his stage-act with the nine-ball trick,
balancing balls on nose and feet
while executing a neat somersault,
rolling one ball over nose and brow,
transferring another from feet to spine to nose,
while the other seven, if seven indeed there are,
slowly go on revolving in the sky,
through the clear air. And yet all this is freedom:
freedom, true, but just a consolation,
the slavery lies in freedom being this,
that not writing is, for some, such slavery
that they must write, and so on and so forth.
Terrible things have been justified by war,
occasioned by war, of which the end result
was torture, foaming lips, shin bones smashed by rifle-butts,
spattered with lye and salt water
so that our neighbours should also get some of it
in the dense crowd, and the windows broken in in the December cold:
was it my free choice to have earned my living
translating this or that book, read such, say, and if
I did not read it, quietly, at twilight, the way
a French bank-robber, a survivor of Mauthausen,
a retired legionnaire, a one-time Gestapo officer,
immediately joined the forces of liberation, etcetera,
and is my reading also an act of freedom?
And would we conquer death in any case?
I doubt it. So I explain to the well and truly dead,
be they people or sparrows: "Nowadays, you know,
you no longer know anything, for here we are on earth,
this earth, and you demand to know its nature.
What do you mean? The only things you own
are where no earth is, nor can you define freedom or peace,
and the only reason I am nagging at you,
troubling you so, but see, you are no longer conscious
of being troubled-though who can tell? I say my piece,
we say my piece, our piece, saying: "You know" and I
no longer know what ends where, the quotation, the idea
(mine, ours, about yourselves), or whether it is you
I am addressing or simply the mouth of the funnel that leads
to my impending death, speaking into it, saying,
admit it, we are still the kind of people who think
that there are people whose names should not be mentioned
in the same breath, whose names are not to be mentioned with ours,
and we defend our freedom by declaring that we do not wish
to meet anyone, nor ever again settle anything,
nor wish that anyone should address us, prefer the mail
not to arrive, wish no success for our verses, for verse, in general.
Is that how it goes, in our poems? "But you no longer know,
are no longer capable of grasping, like the juggler
of grasping his ball, that we are, all of us here,
living dead, and not only in our verses".
