Radio Message

Entrench your heart.
The wolf-packs prowl.
A shepherd in the Beskids
found a flock of doves frozen to death.
A factory on the Volga
has more than doubled
the production of handcuffs.
Entrench your heart.

Outwit your wrath.
Automatic eyes follow
the course of every cloud
across your face.
Men with machine-heads
demand in punched-card language
a justification of your dreams.
Outwit your wrath.

Cast off your hope.
Those well-meaning gentlemen
who nodded to you in the studio
cannot shoot.
Only death stands at your side
and controls your every movement
with the stop-watch.
Cast off your hope.

Conceal, at once, your thoughts
– most dangerous ammunition – beneath time,
a cocked verse in the reading-book
of your son, lament and pain
in the sounding-board of a violin.
And trust the law: the invisible
weapons of freedom
are also deadly.
 

Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead

Heinz Winfried Sabais’s poetry first appeared in English translation by Ruth and Matthew Mead in 1968. Reviewing Generation and other poems in Tribune, Richard Burns wrote: ‘Whether he is concerned with public statement or private emotion, Sabais reveals himself as a commanding spokesman for individual conscience and personal commitment.’

The People and the Stones includes most of the poems collected in the earlier book, together with two long political poems written in the 1970s – ‘Agenda’ and ‘Socialist Elegy’ – and a selection from the posthumously published Self or Saxifrage, a sequence of autobiographical and historical poems written shortly before his death in 1981. Sabais’s distinctive gift lay in presenting the conflicts of the post-war German experience without self-pity, his style is fully conveyed in these translations by a poet of his own generation who has ‘on occasion been surprised to find myself writing down things which, even allowing for the ventriloquist’s-dummy aspect of translation, I might have written myself.’