DEAD LANGUAGE
It wasn't us, it was the people who rejected the language
we forged for years
in the name of power and supremacy
to distinguish the common from the learned
the sprightly from the dull
to make impossible the leap across the abyss
between the Court and the plebs
between word and life.
In fact, we can justify
why we spoke to our subordinates
in a language they did not understand
a language with no cartilage
no heart, no navel.
On all kinds of occasions
we took the same circle
the same hoop
and stretched it like a dry crust of reality
and as it was cracking, coarse as always,
we both remained repulsed -
the people, for being sensitive
we, for being gripped by fear and
the exhorbitant wish to have it our way.
The glass sky of language fell to pieces
and covered everything: if somebody had torn us open
they would have found splinters of the unsaid.
Understand, one of us warned,
when the people sense
mould and consumption in speech,
they assuredly perceive oppression.
There is gloom, where the free word and thought
should glow
in the pleasure of the throat
releasing its mellifluous sonorities.
Nothing probes deeper into man than language
it contains all that was and is endless
not only here, not only in us.
It seems we drifted so far apart
everything began to separate us:
ideology, religion, literature.
Though we may have dreaded
vulgarities in the formal speeches
- in the solemn ones, the ominous, the noble ones -
and though we opposed the habits
of unbridled, lustful and
soft-spoken eloquence
our own language was inexorably dying
as theirs, the heavenly one, was coming into being!
The separation has been perfected
we are done for!
We did not believe in the new
while they were healed by the change;
we were overcome by the despair of eternity
while they were embraced by the miraculousness of
immediate speech.
In our language
we didn't even manage
to communicate the end.
Translated by Ilija Casule and Thomas Shapcott
