Events pushed me into this corner;
I live in a fixed routine,
With my cardboard attaché case full of rotting books.
...If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women
Have a lot to answer for, marrying into the family -
- The mistakes, the wrong people, the half-baked ideas,
And their beastly commnts on everything. Foul.
But irresistbly amusing, that I the whole trouble.
With my cardboard suitcase full of occidental literature
I reached this corner, to educate myself
Against the sort of future they flung into my blood -
The events, the people, the ideas - the ideas!
And I alone know how disreputable and foreign.
But as a thinker, as a professional water-cabbage,
From my desk, of course, I shall dissolve events
As if they were of no importance...none whatever.
...And those women are to blame!
I was already half-way into my disreputable furture,
When I found that they had thrown into my blood
With the mistakes, the people, the ideas (ideas indeed!)
This little cardboard suitcase...damned
Bloved women...and these books, opium, beef, God.
At my desk (lit by its intellectural cabbage-light)
I found them - and they are irresistably amuzing -
These thoughts that have been thown into my blood
