The speaker begins calmly, describing how he reads translated writing. He doesn't take the words at face value but pokes around them, trying to sense the strange, hidden person behind the original. That writer is almost a prisoner, known only through what he produced: trees, cows, judgments, ravings.
Then the tone turns on itself. The speaker calls himself an "impotent feeling self-important fool," and his thoughts spiral into a wish to escape. He imagines swallowing a whole country, becoming one with it, then belching and forgetting it. He wants to be free of the nervous city, its coffee, cigarettes and routines.
By the end, the mood is frantic. The swearing, the broken syntax and the images of a hand stuck in the throat and a heart weaving through arteries suggest a mind overwhelmed by its own restlessness. The final line, "everywhere blood!", leaves us with panic rather than resolution. Judging by the poem, the quiet curiosity about someone else's voice exposes the speaker's frustration with his own.