2001. augusztus 12., vasárnap

Oh, Globalization! translated by David Hill

Oh Globalization!

- a poetic unhepic about spherization -

 

Friends, earthlings, countrymen,

lend me your ears.

I came to bury the vacation

And to praise

- globalization:

 

vacation

acation

cation

ation

tion

ion

on

ion

tion

ation

zation

ization

lization

alization

balization

obalization

lobalozation

 

Globalization!

 

Oh Globalization!

 

Say, who or what are you?

Can you be addressed?

If not a person: can you be personified?

Can you be called „Pal” or „Buddy” –

Possibly?

Or are you beyond us,

Or even beyond Good and Evil? - 

Or bist du schon jenseits?

Oder are you well beyond?

Or are you Evil itself?

Or are you Good itself?

Wrong or Right?

Tell us right now, all right?

 

Are you good or are you bad?

Are you either/or, or are you not either/or?

 

Those who wear veils, or wear historic Hungarian cloaks, or wear rakish natty waistcoats, or wear braided, armored, strapped, medalled, decorative costumes, or wear plain, patterned or frilly folk dress, or wear

saris, skirts, baggy breeches, cassocks, soccer jerseys, kimonos, or homespun things, preserving the traditions of many global fashions, all these people hate globalization and repudiate it with one voice, because supposedly it forces everything onto one shoemaker’s last, it washes our brains, it plunders our pockets, it poisons our environment, and it converts our granny’s local individual pie into a global indiscriminate pizza. Because it’s always Coke, Marlboro, Microsoft, CNN. Our Earth, the globe, is constantly heating up, and species, cultures, histories are definitively disappearing.

Even our languages are dying out –

oh, no, not only this. –

 

But why?

Oh why?

 

That blasted ugly Faustlike genie

– the one who unleashed unholy

masses of sinister goblins,

Frankenstein Golems

who’ve now lost their chains, only

they haven’t yet won the world wholly –

that’s who’s to blame!

 

Globalization, poor thing,

is more innocent than a lamb.

Global capitalism is to blame,

that’s the baddie.

Blame money and blame gravity!

 

It so happened that Newton was strolling

in the garden, and from the apple tree

a lovely red apple fell in front of him:

Attracted by the mess, the Earth.

The apple always plops down in

the direction the Earth, the mass attracts it.

As for money, behold, that too always goes

Where the mass is: money, moneymass.

For people’s mass, if just a little money is mentioned,

Newton and many other altruist

sends food, teaches,

helps, uses, seeks, finds,

but it's pointless –

as long as money, the mainspring of the movers,

always naturally gravitates towards the moneymass.

This apparatus is unjust and unfair:

free-fall is not uplifting.

 

But anyway:

this is capital concentration,

not globalization.

 

But there is a certain possibility

that the frightening Golem of spherization

might show its more congenial face:

if our action is collective, open, active, public.

Let’s all give ourselves over the great collective,

not expecting anything in return,

let’s give, for free use,

and without a drop of fear,

as before God;

let’s share all the information.

Let our gene maps and all our brains

And even our dreams be open source.

 

Look at the brain cells in the grey matter!

Their cooperation is so wonderful!

The most beautiful scheme of systems,

their Gascognean spirit,

Oh brain-sphere!

But imagine the other one, the earth-sphere!

- Soon there’ll be billions of us on it! –

if every person on there (on here)

would cooperate in a network like the cells in our brains do,

then that – this – what would it be?

Earth-ly integration?

Thinking globe?

Or – glabalization?

-----------------

English by David Hill

- check his website at www.lyriklife.com -

2001. augusztus 12. 02:48 | bloggerlo

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