It's even more "inaccurate" than that, Chris, since the last line (we are told in the literal) means: "An overabundance of heads always leads to complete headlessness." That's a very clever line whose sense is simply not present in the translation as far as I can tell.
Yet I heartily defend the translation, which I love. I think that when translating funny or witty poems, the main thing that the translator has to translate is the funniness and the wit, and sometimes that means changing the joke a bit, provided the joke is pretty much in the same spirit in both the original and the translation. I would argue that a translator should have more "liberty" when translating funny than serious. The literal sense without a laugh is less "accurate," in my opinion, than a less literal translation that provides the laugh.
As near as I can tell, the original doesn't have any sort of equivalent for the read's/heads rhyme, either, but I can't imagine that anyone would fault the translator for that inspiration.
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