Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

THE MIRACLE OF ART In the era of the Great Leveling of Mountains, the Emperor was E Li-fan, which means elephant. And so the sculptor Chu, after ten long years of work, erected a huge statue of an elephant on the central plaza of the capital in the pose of Napoleon, but without his tricorne hat, for at that time, no one knew who Napoleon was. For this reason, the statue had sported a flat top, so that when the Emperor Don Ki, which means donkey, assended to the throne during the era of the Great Settlement of the Deserts, the sculptor Chu now erected on this head a life-sized donkey carrying a volume of poems under his arm, for as is well known, the Emperor was especially fond of poems about his person. Now, the deserts were not at all sand-strewn and barren places, but rather, wastelands that had been formed after the Great Leveling of Mountains, and so the former mountain springs now flowed through them. Inasmuch as the glaciers that fed them were gradually melting, without being renewed, the era of the great Confluence of Rivers began, when the Emperor was already ChimPan-zee, which, as strange as it might seem, is properly translated as baboon. And so, the sculptor Chu installed a baboon on top of the donkey’s head and, inasmuch as, for the stability of this construction, the baboon was holding onto the donkey’s ears, he came out looking hunched over and with a face distorted by tension, something that, most fortunately, wasn’t visible

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