Contributions to the History of Giving up Poem by Branko Čegec

When I stopped writing reviews
I wrote them in every sentence that I uttered.
When I stopped writing
every encounter with words was becoming literature.
I say "was becoming" because at this moment I am again
with a pencil in my hand
and I am writing the diary of my own giving up
on the language, words, things
I have always preferred uncertainty:
numerous forms of self - reliance regularly
used to fill me with the sad space of emptiness
behind which the dark fingers of an octopus protruded
and the loneliness of lavish tricks of nothingness
which I read this morning in a friend's poem,
to which "fathers and children"
of happy generations swore. High on the horizon, behind
which
I can only still see my own figure
in the mirror of the ocean, there flies a lonely bird.
That is my or just momentary
stopped sentence of confronted vibrations.
All the same, it makes me more proud than the pronounced
meaning does.

1988

Translated by Miljenko Kovačićek