Poems by Tarek Eltayeb
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CIRCUS
The circus is set up with care Rain falls through The tent’s shredded grey fabric Now and again in the pale light Somnolent spectators Applaud the bear-trainer A girl on a rope turns somersaults through the air A girl on the ground yells into the microphone A clapping clown rolls on a ball A man pours sweat as if he’s praying … A donkey in the corner stomps the ground in boredom A lion’s trapped behind the bars A tiger leaps through loops of flame Elephants walk in a circle A dog barks, a musician barks And it’s raining I was sitting in the middle of the listless crowd When the stranger beside me suddenly Nudged me to applaud: I didn’t. And so a man arrived, a wonder to see With a tie and a butterfly and a funny hat Looking like he’d just emerged from some chicken coop He angrily asked for my ticket And when he saw it he cried: “You’re sitting in the wrong place!” He led me off and sat me down behind a pole Where all I could see was the donkey in its distant corner Still stomping the ground in boredom Translated from Arabic by Wolfgang Astelbauer COFFEE AND WATER A hundred times a day, he says, “I’ll have to return. Here, there is no mercy. There, there is kindness and warmth and …” Then he falls silent. I ask him, “There? Where is that?” He points somewhere. His face is expressionless, and he does not say anything anymore. I take his hand. We go to a café and sit down at a quiet corner table. I order coffee for him and water for me. I speak to him in Arabic and mix water into the coffee. He is annoyed, “Are you crazy?” He tries to remove the water from the coffee. He tries to. He tries to get the water back into the water. Translated from Arabic by Wolfgang Astelbauer |
Tarek Eltayeb was born to Sudanese parents in Cairo, Egypt, in 1959 and he has been living in Vienna, Austria, since 1984. Writing since 1985, he has published three novels, two collections of short stories, five collections of poems, a play, an autobiography and a book of essays. In 2008, he was appointed Austrian Ambassador for the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue. In the same year, he received the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria. He is a faculty member of the International Writing Program (IWP) Between the Lines at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, USA. His awards include the Elias Cannetti Fellowship from the City of Vienna.
Two of his novels have been published in English by American University of Cairo Press, The Palm House in 2012 and Cities Without Palms in 2015. His last two collections of poems (We Sold the Ground and Were Happy with the Dust and Not A Sin) were published in Beirut (2010) and Cairo (2011) respectively. |
