Swiss Psalm II
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Translated by Daniele Pantano
What the devil should I do with this country?
It spreads at my feet, two steps
in length and three
in width, like the garden
of an industrialist
who's out-of-town
on some shady business.
Maybe in twenty or fifty years
he'll be bankrupt,
leaving behind families wailing
and perplexed historians searching
for explanations.
In the United States of America, one can sit
for an entire week on a fast train
until, curving around a weather-beaten
foothill of the Rocky Mountains,
one sees the great ocean.
In Russia, the Tran-Siberian Express
is such an overwhelming venture
that entire trains
steaming for years
through the Gobi desert
never arrived.
Everywhere else the sky is infinite
and the earth
spreads itself limitlessly, dives
into the sea and surfaces
somewhere else as a new continent.
Travelers assure me of this.
But when one rides a train
in this country,
one can travel from one border
to the other in four or five
hours and, looking at Lake Constance,
still pick one's teeth
for the remains
of the meal one sat down to
in Geneva.
And one is in such dire need
of distances at that.
Often, when I'm angry and without hope,
I say:
This country is a Land of shit.
It lies before me, in the four frames of my windows,
so to speak.
A plate with a fat dish from a once
prosperous house,
that's even more so today.
Given to a dog, donated
by an old lady,
who--and she always talks of this--has lived
a proper life for eight-hundred and fifty years.
The neighbors say
she's humane and an animal lover.
Yet I don't want to eat from this plate.
But I must.
Even a dog wants to live.
Times are bad now.
But only a few notice it.
And I really don't like the mountains either.
Like it makes sense to stick heads
and bones in such high
heights, where it always snows
even in midsummer.
And then one stands there,
shielded by ice, without life,
a public enemy not even
the chamois climb.
After all, our literary chroniclers
are the same way.
So much is like this in our country. Often,
I know
that we've all been extinct,
mice and men.
The girls go to the watch factory. Brothels
and the Jesuits are against the law.
The dead are living the fullest in our country.
