A loose and quick translation of Majid Mirzaei's poem
In This Strange World
In this strange world Oh yea, this is a strange world
The age of technology
You can surveil the four corner of the world!
By just touching a button
You have the universe on the corner of your room
And sitting in front of your computer
You can buy handicrafts of a Mexican woman
Or the artifact of a child in China, India or Vietnam
Or can book a room in the most luxurious hotels of Canary Islands
And even with a woman!
You can lay down on the bed of a clinic close to your house
And your doctor in another continent,
or even in another planet vasectomize you!
In this strange world
Surrounded by one-thousand-eye skyscraping giants
This dusty street-rover, confused and stumbling
Is searching for himself, here and there
Worn out of fruitless search
Tired of faltering along streets
I sit at the table
Press finger on the keyboard
JOB SEARCHING and GO
And soon, Amazed by this high speed
The words NOT FOUND appear
A frozen stream worms its way within remotest rocks of my body
And washes away waves of fear and anxiety
And futile hopes.
I feel the gravity of the whole world on my shoulders.
I feel in the most gallant metropolis in the world
With my ancestors
In deserts burnt of poverty
Like a sweating horse under the yoke
Revolve around the closed circle of straw and sorrow, dizzy and astray
In this strange world
Surrounded by one-thousand-eye skyscraping giants
This dusty street-rover Stumbling and confused
Is stumbling in search for his geography
Does the poet likes to mock technology? The old debate whether modern technology has brought a better life for us or not. Looking at statistics and figures, mainstream sociologists and management experts and economists claim improvement of life standards. On the other hand, the growing gap between the poor and the rich, job insecurity, crisis of identity etc. have not been solved. We all welcome the Internet in our life, as well as other modern-time technologies, but the question of discordance between the level of technique and relations among human beings still exists.
ReplyDeleteut natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become – albeit in an estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie.Karl Marx
ReplyDeleteEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844