Translated from the Hungarian of Mihaly Babits

Words have become unfaithful to me,

Or I have become like a spilling stream,

So hesitant, aimless, and shoreless,

And I carry my many vain, old words

Like the rambling deluge carries the rended

Breakwaters and range-poles and fences.

Oh, if only the Master would give the motion

Of my stream a channel, to oceans

Lead it on safe roads; if only the tip

Of my verses he would embroider with

Ready-made rhyme, and His Holy Bible,

Which on my shelf here stands, 

Would be my prosody;

And as Jonah, his slothful servant, hiding

Long ago, and then like Jonah in the whale,

I would descend to the vivid and hot

And deaf darkness of torments, not

For three days, but for three months, for three years, for

Three centuries, that I might find, before

I forever vanish in the jail

Of a darker, more everlasting whale,

The ancient voice; and, with my words standing in

A faultless phalanx, just as He whispers them,

That I might bravely speak out, as from

This wretched throat I can, and not tire out

Until evening or the powers of the sky

And Niniveh grant me to speak, and not die.