What if Poets Could Perform Magic? [1]
Urs Widmer [2]
Translated by xia23
If it were spring now or if the sun were shining or if a pretty single lady picked me up or even if a real rain fell from the sky and washed my head: what would I do, where would I go? In whose house would I eat my breakfast, in whose bed would I sleep, who would I be? After all I’ve been an academic for years, a babysitter since the academic years (yes, once I wanted to be a baker too, with white hair, whit hands, white pants and white jacket, as if they were full of plaster), a camping friend, a poet, a husband, a pedestrian, a guest worker, hungry, me, a comrade of cavaliers, a teacher, sometimes lively sometimes tired, a non-smoker, a fruit cake lover, a pessimist, a rubbish head, a red wine drinker, a skier, a theater play writer, a lodger, careful, a waltz dancer (The 1st prize at the Bickel dance school [3]) and a dentist patient with nerves. That’s all true. That’s me. Sometime everything turned out like this, somehow.
I’m 37 years old, Swiss, live in Frankfurt am Main [4], my wife‘s name is May, like May Britt, not like Mae West, and if we had a child, it would be called Fanny.
That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t sometimes like to be someone else and something different. Oh, I would be then, instead of an aging author of novels and theater playwriter, an Alpine dweller, a farmer in the mountains, I would take a charter flight to China, I would perhaps be Dane in Denmark, I would like to have the most amazing experiences, to cycle through France, to stay healthy, to hold a hammer in my hand but no sickle, to be less interested in myself, to become a Jazz musician, to kiss funny kindergarten teachers, to run through empty landscapes, to rent the most modern motorcycles, to be curious, optimistic, and practical, to write only quality works, to travel in quiet smoking compartments, to step in dirty chimneys, to be sad, to get very old, to lose all caution, I would never like to be insane, I would never have to deal with a shrew and I would like to be my own dentist, all my own teeth.
Or I changed my surroundings, instead of myself. For example: I stopped an express train between Stockholm and Malmö (these are about the only two cities in Sweden, I know that). I would demand that environment pollution stop immediately all over the world and that everything must become completely different, friendlier, happier and freer. We want us to feel good, I would shout. I would rather leave the conductor standing in the rain until he got pneumonia, and would ask if anyone wanted that. Also the European Economic Community must be immediately banned because it were not acceptable that everyone in Europe ate the same potato model.
That would be something, a world, which would be made by poets! Poets should be able to perform magic. They could do it once, a hundred thousand years ago. The difficulty today would only be, that all poets would conjure up his own, very personal world. Everyone would want to break the world of his colleague. Every dream murder would suddenly become true. Every poem would make flowers grew up and wolves disappeared. Oh, it is good, that the poets can’t perform magic.
[1]. p. 46. Was wäre wenn die Dichter zaubern könnten? Kontakt mit der Zeit. Dieter Stöpfgeshoff. Max Hueber Verlag. Germany, 1995.
[2]. Urs Widmer. 5/21/1938 – 4/2/2014. A Swiss novelist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_Widmer
[3]. Bickel Dance School. Tanzschule Bickel.
[4]. Frankfurt am Main. Official name of Frankfurt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt
