Once upon a time, he imagines, people actually read poetry. They read it, they read it out. They gathered together and read, and listened. Perhaps they still do! Perhaps that's what happens in the countries of Bobrowski and Herbert, of Kovner and Sachs.
That's what happens in his imaginary Europe, he says. In his imaginary Mitteleuropa, he says. In his Old Europe of the mind. One person reads, another person listens. They take it in turns. The first listens, the other person reads.
And it's not pretentious, he says. It's not literary, he says. It's part of life, real life, ordinary life. It's like eating a crust of bread. It's like beer and sausages, which is what they eat in Mitteleuropa, he imagines. Beer and sausages, outside on trestle tables! Beer and sausages in the mild spring evening, the thaw long since come and gone, the winter snow forgotten.
In the mild evening, in spring, you can read poetry as you eat you beer and sausages alone, the poet imagines. There'd be nothing unusual in it. Nothing literary. He despises the literary, he says. The literary, literature; he spits. That's a sign that you've come too late, when you start using words like literature, he says.
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One day, he'll read, really read, he tells himself. Perhaps such reading requires what Kafka wanted for his writing: an underground room, far below the earth, in which he'd be locked up, sequestered, and to which there would occasionally be brought meals.
To be locked up with a book! Locked up with Ungaretti! Ah, what a marvel, says the poet. To be locked up with Montale! Locked up with Amichai!, and not the Penguin Modern European Poets edition, either.
Facing translations, that's what he'd want. Facing translations, and he could map word onto word. He could mouth the words the translated ones would mirror. He could mouth them one by one and suck on them like lozenges, like cool stones in his mouth.
Hasn't he dreamt of learning a language by divining its correspondence with its facing translation? Of learning the languages of Nezval, say, or Cavafy by going back and forth between the original poem and the facing translation?
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