Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Hong Kong 1997
Have you seen the builders of this city,
illiterate acrobats climbing up skyhigh
on bamboo scaffolding?
Have you bought the cheapest jeans
and slept in the most expensive beds on earth?
Did you cough in the incense-filled temples
and smell the clouds of French perfume
hanging over the sewers?
Have you heard the clatter of gambling dens
and the roar at the stock exchange?
And the tourists, did you notice them
rubbing their eyes, exhausted from shopping,
like giant pink shrimps
behind tinted bus windows?

No. This town, in which a thousand flowers wither,
which has got over its Great Leap Forward
long ago, is beyond belief. It is a phantom,
a portent, a hallucination, a science-fiction opera,
a miraculous fake.

Translated by Anni Dyck

“The notion of a lack of alternatives offends human reason, because it amounts to a ban on thought. It is a statement of capitulation, not an argument.”

Hans Magnus Enzenberger criticizing eurozone policymakers for insisting that their proposals for solving the crisis are the only way forward
in "Brussels, the Gentle Monster: Or the Disenfranchisement of Europe", by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Martin Chalmers



Image 
Xue Jiye, chinese painter and sculptor, born 1965


music
Klaus Schulze - Mirage
0:00:00 - Velvet Voyage
0:28:21 - Crystal Lake
0:57:37 - In Cosa Crede Chi Non Crede (Bonus Track)