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 books, carefully rationed, I hear orations, ragged and rough,
And I sing threatening lullabies To the local big shot kulak.
That self-styled creative designer, That comber of the kolkhoz flax,
That mixer of ink with human 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, A domestic torrent of fear
Will burst into the hack-built walls Of this harsh Moscow lodging here.
director, art director, 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