Night wet, oppressive, one could drown outside;
In thick fog: red and wearying here and there
Burn sadly street-lamps without gleam of light:
A wet and dirty pot-house, as it were.

Still darker on the outskirts seems the night…
Sad hovels are now flooded everywhere,
A dry and bitter cough is echoed wide
Through crumbling walls dilapidated there.

Like Edgar Poe, I am returning home,
Or like Verlaine, quite liquefied with gin —
On such a night nothing can worry me.

And then, with steps of strange enormity
I grope about some time at my own home,
Tumbling, tumbling again, bawling within.

Translated by Alfred Margul-Sperber