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Contempt

By Elfriede Jelinek b. 1946 Elfriede Jelinek

Translated By Michael Hofmann

my puppet-strings are the

sweet decaying lamps I flutter round.

I am as immense

as a black kid with a spinning top.

drowned tripper fat

crawls into hollow cuffs to be sewn up

like hot cats

cracked soft caryatids in tails.

I'll force you all to your knees

your dirty muzzles will squawk

out of your faces.

and I will continue to climb

I'll spread my thin arms along the queer walls

till they bleed.

I'll reach into threadbare velvet

so that you bash yourselves like poor moths

on corners of night.

the reason I'm here is

to scratch all the white bellies

squatting down there.

your stupid silence I will just

toss up in the air.

I am as sky high

as all your staring regards laid end to end

on the ground somewhere

lies my broken smile.

Source: Poetry (November 2007).

Biography

Recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature, Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian poet, playwright, and novelist. Born to a Catholic-Viennese mother and a Jewish-Czech father in Mürzzuschlag, Styria, Jelinek grew up in Vienna and lost many members of her family to the Holocaust.

Jelinek studied music intensively from an early age. She graduated from the Vienna Conservatory and studied theater and art history at the University of . . .

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