Extract from Michael Mitchell's translation

Friedrich Glauser's In Matto's Realm

There followed the strange passage of prose Studer had read that morning, only the beginning was a little different:
When the mist spins the rain into thin threads … and so on, and so on. Then came the passage about the coloured streamers fluttering all over the world and War flaring up and the bit about the red balls and Revolution blazing up to the heavens … It was similar and yet different. This time Studer found it strangely moving and he shivered. So much had happened in the meantime. He had found the Director at the bottom of the iron ladder, he’d seen his apartment and understood the loneliness of an old man. He had seen Laduner breathe a sigh of relief, he'd seen his wife breathe a sigh of relief …

And Sergeant Studer read the last section of Schül's unrhymed poem:
Matto! He is powerful. He can take on all shapes, now he is short and fat, now slim and tall, and the world is his puppet theatre. Men do not realise that he is playing with them, like a puppeteer with his marionettes … And his fingernails are as long as those of a Chinese scholar, glassy and green …