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THE APARTMENT IS QUIET AS PAPER
Osip Mandelstam

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The apartment is quiet as paper,
Empty, without any decor,

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Soft sounds come from the radiator:
Inside, liquid babbles and pours.

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The estate is fully in order,
The telephone's stiff as a toad,

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The various well-worn belongings
Are just begging to be thrown out.

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The damn walls are unfaithfully thin,
And there's nowhere else to run to,

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But I am obliged, for someone, to
Play tunes, like a clown, on a comb.

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I read rationed books,
I hear ragged orations

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And I sing my stern lullabies
To the local kolkhoz boss-man.

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That self-styled creative designer,
That comber of the kolkhoz flax,

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That mixer of ink with blood -
He has earned my fearsome stake.

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That honest and plainspoken traitor,
Boiled clean in the purges like salt,

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A dutiful husband and father -
Would squash such a threat like a moth.

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Come on then - let's start, you and I,
As if we stood on the headman's block.

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Old slob, after seventy years,
It's time for you to stamp your boots.

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And instead of Hippocrene's spring,
An abiding torrent of fear

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Will burst into the hack-built walls
Of this harsh Moscow lodging here.

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director, production designer, animator 
Yekaterina Aldashina-Filippova

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narrator
Mihail Yefremov

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Trans. by Niffiwan, based on translations
by Ian Probstein, Clarence Brown, and
W.S. Merwin. Subs by Argopoiss