Клеопатра - перевод А. Блока

Cleopatra
Panopticum is now opened:
For one year, the second and the third...
The drunken and impudent crowd
Is hurrying... to see the coffin board.
The empress is there lying behind the glass...
She seems to be not dead, and not alive.
And people all are whispering around
The shameless words about.
She's stretched lazily along -
Forgetful ever and forever sleeping...
A snake is slowly and lightly stinging
Her wax and motionless breast.
And I'm, a selling and a shameful man
With dark-blue circles round eyes,
Have come to look at her wax face,
Which is now opened at once...
You are all seen to everyone,
But if the coffin was then empty,
I could accept not only one time
The haughty sigh of lips decayed.
"Let's perfume me and flowers scatter.
Long-long ago I was the empress
Of Egypt. Now I'm wax.
I'm a dust, a clay, an ash."
"Oh, Empress! I'm captive one
Of you, I was a slave in Egypt.
Todays I'm a poet, a Tzar!
And this is predetermined destiny!
And do you see today from coffin,
That Russia's drunken as the Rome
Of you, as Ceasar - we all
Be equal our fate before?"
I've ended speech. I look.
She doesn't hear.
But breast of her is slightly waving
Under the fair cloths transparent...
I hear words, as if she's saying:
"Then I was able burst in thunders.
And I'll force to burst it now
Out of drunken poet - tears,
Out of drunken bitch - a laugh."

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