Our Mansions

Here is an adequate translation that's linkable, but the citation below has been copied out by hand from a selection translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, Little Brown and Company Boston-Toronto 1967.

You know. Like from a book. Those paper thingies.

"We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye..."

We don't know how to say goodbye:
we wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down;
You're moody, I am your shadow.

Let's step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.

Or else let's sit in the graveyard
on the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
in which we shall always be together.

Anna Akhmatova
1917