THE APARTMENT IS QUIET AS PAPER Osip Mandelstam
The apartment is quiet as paper, Empty, without any decor,
Soft sounds come from the radiator: Inside, liquid babbles and pours.
The estate is fully in order, The telephone's stiff as a toad,
The various well-worn belongings Are just begging to be thrown out.
The damn walls are unfaithfully thin, And there's nowhere else to run to,
But I am obliged, for someone, to Play tunes, like a clown, on a comb.
I read rationed books, I hear ragged orations
And I sing my stern lullabies To the local kolkhoz boss-man.
That self-styled creative designer, That comber of the kolkhoz flax,
That mixer of ink with blood - He has earned my fearsome stake.
That honest and plainspoken traitor, Boiled clean in the purges like salt,
A dutiful husband and father - Would squash such a threat like a moth.
Come on then - let's start, you and I, As if we stood on the headman's block.
Old slob, after seventy years, It's time for you to stamp your boots.
And instead of Hippocrene's spring, An abiding torrent of fear
Will burst into the hack-built walls Of this harsh Moscow lodging here.
director, production designer, animator Yekaterina Aldashina-Filippova
narrator Mihail Yefremov
Trans. by Niffiwan, based on translations by Ian Probstein, Clarence Brown, and W.S. Merwin. Subs by Argopoiss