english translation by Peter Zollman

Abandoned by my words I’m left alone
or I’ve become an aimless overflown
drifting river and in my murky mud I
drag the flotsam washed up in the flood:
old idioms exhausted vain pretences
like broken hedgerows signpost maybe fences.
Oh would the Master wisely grant the force
that channels deep, to lead a steady course
toward the sea, and would He fit the rhyme
to fringe my verse perfectly every time
ready for use by me the good disciple,
(for prosody I’d read His holy Bible),
as lazy Jonah shirked to no avail,
and then for three days rotted in the Whale,
I too went down and shared those deadly bays
of hot throbbing pain, but for thirty days,
for thirty years or three hundred, who knows,
to find, before my book will firmly close
and even blinder and eternal
Whale shall swallow my last departing journal,
my real voice, to marshal every true
word into action, as He gives the cue,
to speak up loud as it is right and fitting
for all to hear (my sickly throat permitting)
until the powers, cosmic and Ninevean
will silence me and send me to oblivion.

Mihály Babits (1883 – 1941)