He feels the region as closely around his skin as if he were being embraced. His eyes are already quite tired from being so amazed, limp with exhaustion from awakening too often, they stay open now as if they were fixed in that position, so that they don’t constantly have to be pried apart again; with open eyes through blind windows. . underway, but not of his own volition, without all too painful a departure, brought to a stop without having noticed the motion of the trip. . to a layover deprived of arrival. . as if everything could fall away back into oneself
Sad serenity accompanies everything he has overcome, all the painful fulfillments of the confident denials sent in his direction, and he has the firm feeling, only because he has so carefully gotten lost, that he will soon find himself at last, which is what he has always been seeking to do.
In the meantime, the region has become so visible at a glance that you can’t keep anything clearly in view anymore.
Soon, he thinks, we will have completely dissolved in it, when my skin is the skin of the sky at the point where dawn and dusk take place simultaneously, when I feel the sky above me more and more as my own skin somehow pulled lightly over my head, like a fur coat pulled over my ears.
Much that is now invisible will soon be very easy to discover, because everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can’t see through anything anymore.
About the Authors
GERT JONKE is counted among Austria’s most important authors and dramatists. Among other honors, he received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature. He died in 2009 at the age of 62.
JEAN M. SNOOK lives with her husband on the easternmost tip of North America, the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland, where she has taught German language and literature at Memorial University since 1984. She received the 2009 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize as well as the 2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Gert Jonke’s The Distant Sound.