HEAR, O ISRAEL
By Erich Fried
When we were persecuted
I was one among you
How can remain one
when you become persecutors?
Your longing was
to become like other nations
who murdered you
Now you have become like them
You have survived
those who were cruel to you
Does their cruelty
now lives on in you?
: The defeated you did order:
"Take off your shoes"
As the scapegoat you chased
them into the desert
into the great mosque of death
whose sandals are sand
but they didn´t accept the sin
which you wanted to inflict on them
The print of their naked feet
in the desert sand will outlast the trace
of your bombs and tanks.
So O you “Israel” hear…
Hear the whimpers of your victims…
Echoing your old sufferings…
Erich Fried was a Jew born in Austria and exiled to Great Britain when the Nazis overtook the country 1930
.His father died under interrogation by the Gestapo After the war, he settled in Germany and joined, together with Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Peter Weiss, Martin Walser and Paul Celan, the Group 47, founded by Hans-Werner Richter with the aim of cleansing the German language of the Nazi legacy. He became one of the harshest critics of the US war in Vietnam, of Zionism and of the authoritarian tendencies in Western Germany during the Sixties and Seventies. Fried is one of the most important post-modern poets of German language. He was also an important translator of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, T.S Eliot, Graham Greene and Sylvia Plath.
Erich Fried (1921- 1988)
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق