On the Ledge: Joseph Brodsky in English

Collected Poems in English. By Joseph Brodsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Pp. 540. $30 (hb).

In his birthday poem entitled "May 24, 1980," Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) evokes hardships he has encountered during forty years of living, then he concludes stunningly: "Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx, / only gratitude will be gushing from it." "Gratitude"—this is a fine word with which to remember him. Despite exile and a faulty heart, as well as personal disappointments to which a few poems (such as "On Love" or "Six Years Later") discreetly allude, the Russian poet invigoratingly, and contagiously, expresses gratitude for a cosmos in which, as philosophers phrase it, there seems to be "something instead of nothing"—a cosmos full of beautiful, funny, or puzzling "things" in which we can delight. And not just delight, it must be added, but also, potentially, feel the welling-up of that rare and, as Brodsky sometimes terms it, "higher" sentiment created in us when we read evocations of and thus envision—see anew—the same things, yet this time as they are passed through the revivifying perceptual and linguistic filters of a gifted poet. However ontologically separate they remain from us, cobblestones, for Brodsky, are not just wet, they "glisten like bream in a net." And the frigidness of the North (and of the Communist era during which he grew up and suffered) is experienced as a polysemous "cold that, to warm my palm, / gathered my fingers around a pen." This ultimately optimistic—or more precisely, affirming—outlook does not mean that Brodsky's poetry is naive, self-deluding, or facilely joyous. On the contrary, his writing can be melancholy, even bitterly clear-sighted. It can also be tantalizingly mysterious, akin in this respect to the ungraspable cognitive processes of thinking and especially versifying:

Instead of succumbing, in incurable despair, to "the queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness," a notion nonetheless backdropping and surely often catalyzing his inspiration, Brodsky is more inclined to praise this "who-knows-what-under-the sun." He hails butterflies, for instance, for being "frail and shifting buffer[s] / dividing [Nothingness] from me." He is deeply grateful for these comforting "buffers," for the miracle of existing in an unpredictable, bewildering cosmos (and even in our "wholly new / but doleful world"), for being gifted with a sensitivity ever-attuned to the plenitude and intricacy of a moment of being alive, and above all for what he considered to be man's noblest response to the human condition: poetry. With characteristic modesty (yet not a little pride), he proclaims an admirable commitment to his craft in his poem "1972":

The name of the country? The name of the poet? The ambiguity is telling, as well as moving. The very title of this welcome gathering, Collected Poems in English, underscores Brodsky's intimate relationship with the English language—the initial attraction to which occurred long before his forced emigration to the United States in 1972. In Less than One (1986), he recounts his first exposure to English poetry, and notably to that of W. H. Auden, who would become his generous friend. As regards Brodsky's own translations and original compositions in English, this special relationship has of course been impugned by some critics and fellow poets; and I admit to having myself been occasionally estranged, literally, by Brodsky's linguistic "xenity": his quirky uses of American slang; his sometimes troublesome syntax, with our uninflected language; his unidiomatic juxtapositions (whereby magpies "chirp"); or his not-quite-natural verbal tenses, such as the confusing simple past—as opposed to a pluperfect—in the second of the first two lines of his magnificent sequence, "Vertumnus": "I met you the first time ever in latitudes you'd call foreign. / Your foot never trod that loam; your fame, though, had reached those quarters."

This being said, it is important to recall that the poet, in the same essay on Auden, justifies his initial attempts to write in English as a desire to communicate, as it were, with his deceased mentor. This is a characteristically self-dismissing, half-superstitious, though (I think) ultimately sincere, confession; and listening carefully to its deepest implications should move us to reread English poems (and translations) of which a word here or there perturbs. After all, he forthrightly claims (in a brief note included in the first edition of A Part of Speech) to "rework" translations made by other hands, "to bring [the versions] closer to the original, though perhaps at the expense of their smoothness." (It has been my experience that bilinguals, let alone polyglots, are rarely pedantically over-concerned with "smoothness"; and they often even appreciate a certain "xenity," because it can reinforce the fidelity of a translation. Is not this critical position as tenable as the more widespread rule that the host-language should remain, at all costs, without nicks and smudges?) In any event, we must always remember that Brodsky remained a Russian poet (despite his increasing forays into English) and that only a third of his Russian poems were translated during his lifetime—an arrestingly small amount of work that is available to us. The two main French collections of Brodsky's verse, Collines et autres poèmes (Seuil, 1966) and Poèmes 1961-1987 (Gallimard, 1987), reveal the importance of earlier, pre-immigration, poems that we still lack in English, a lacuna that will hopefully be filled by the upcoming, expanded, version of George L. Kline's Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems (1973). A bilingual complete works is in preparation.

In the meantime, this new volume reprints A Part of Speech (1980), To Urania (1988), and So Forth (1996), and it includes twenty-six previously uncollected poems as well as five translations (two poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, and one each by Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wislawa Szymborska). Disappointingly, no genuine surprises crop up among the previously uncollected poems; most of them are light verse or political satire. Yet the translations include Mandelstam's most famous poem, "Tristia" (1916), which evokes Ovid's exile. This translation thus represents a double homage: first, to the Roman poet with whom Brodsky most deeply empathized and about whom he himself wrote several poems, sometimes in the same epistolary forms favored by the author of Tristia and the Epistulae Ex Ponto; second, to a fellow countryman whom he considered to be the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century.

This key translation, moreover, acts as a corrective. For Americans who are impressed by the disarming "surrealism" of Brodsky's startling similes (which yoke together heterogeneous images or, with only obscure transitions, combine sense impressions and ideas), it cannot be emphasized enough how much he learned from Mandelstam's densely textured, tightly crafted, symbolism, and, more generally, from the aesthetics of the Russian "Acmeist" movement. Brodsky praises the way poetry "accelerates thought," in other words its ability to compress into a remarkably stimulating handful of words a bundle of ideas, sensations, and sentiments, and thereby to reveal their unsuspected, esoteric, interconnections. The poem helps us to leap ahead, cognitively, along paths that discursive prose can never parallel. In "Elegy: for Robert Lowell," one encounters this extremely dense image-idea-question: "What is Salvation, since / a tear magnifies like glass / a future perfect tense?" In "Lithuanian Nocturne," to cite another example, Brodsky writes, both concisely and synaesthetically: "A sequence of face / blots the dark windowpane / like the slap of a downpour." In his great sequence, "Lullaby of Cape Cod," he similarly compares formally spaced "streetlamps glisten[ing] in stifling weather" to "white shirt buttons open to the waist." One hears echoes of Mandelstam in such lines or at least imagines that the elder Russian poet—who, having been arrested by the Soviet police, perished in a transit camp two years before Brodsky was born—would have appreciated them. Like Brodsky after him, Mandelstam also abruptly shifts perspectives or seemingly transmutes configurations of matter into other existential states. Brodsky's two other Russian models were Tsvetaeva and especially Anna Akhmatova, who called attention to his poetry when he was only eighteen years old.

Brodsky's earlier "Elegy on John Donne," which is not included in this comprehensive gathering, likewise suggests that he attentively read the English Metaphysicals. From the Metaphysicals he presumably gained confidence in his own natural inclination to mix metaphysics and whimsy, cosmology and love, religion and zoology, travel and mathematics. Geometric allusions crop up conspicuously in Brodsky, who is obsessed—whenever contemplating the cosmos and intuiting its hidden inner structures—with the possibility of chaos as opposed to coherence, irrationality as opposed to logic. In "Homage to Yalta," he denounces the way "we have been trained to treat [life] as if it were / the object of our logical deductions." "I wish I knew no astronomy," he similarly sighs in the partly whimsical "A Song," "when stars appear, / when the moon skims the water." His poetics thus privilege perceptual immediacy and sudden insight, but they also toy with strict logical inference. Besides dauntlessly extrapolating metaphysical conclusions from Euclid's mathematical presuppositions ("the zer- / o Euclid thought the vanishing point became / wasn't math — it was the nothingness of Time") or concocting fantastical geometric self-portraits ("Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad. / This will be me: no insides in thrall. / Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl"), Brodsky also occasionally conjures up the specter of Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792-1856), the Russian mathematician who founded non-Euclidean geometry by imagining parallel lines converging in infinity. This theoretical conjecture haunts Brodsky, who derives from it a model of his own personal history:

Some of those "unwittingly colliding" parallels involve similarities between Brodsky's life and the biographies of Roman poets such as Martial and Ovid. He is naturally sensitive to their courageous stances, with respect to society and the State, as well as to the emotions induced in them by exile. (Martial was born in Bilbilis, in the north-eastern part of Spain, and considered himself a "Spaniard" though he long lived and worked in Rome.) A close reader of the classics (who quips in a versified letter that his own poetry resembles "Roman writ cum Cyrillic"), Brodsky is likewise a "loyal subject," as he defines himself in "I Sit by the Window," of our contemporary "second-rate years." Yet he is not a genuine satirist, and he regards "tyrants" (as he terms, with a vivid anachronism, the evildoers of our times) with a cold-blooded detachment brilliantly reminiscent of that practiced by the poets of the Roman decadence. Singled out by the Soviet police for "parasitism," he was sent to a hard-labor camp not for writing dissident poetry, but rather because his poems lacked an easily definable political ideology. Rarely indeed does he portray people, let alone himself, in a social context that can be adequately described. For him the "essence of self-portraiture" is, moroever, a kind of "suicide"; and it demands a special awareness of one's future "absence." In "At Carel Willink's Exhibition," he observes that "mastery" is the "ability / to not take fright at the procedure of / nonbeing—as another form of one's / own absence, having drawn it straight from life."

The poet always inserts the daily vicissitudes of human life into larger cosmic perspectives comprising the certainty of our inevitable non-existence. Even a touching, late, love poem like "Porta San Pancrazio" makes this point:

These English, classical, and philosophical influences all inform Brodsky's eventual use of two languages. Because of his specifically Russian poetic background (which involves not only the sophisticated Acmeist poetry of the preceding generation but also the rigorously metered forms beloved by nearly all Russian poets), he cannot be compared in every detail to bi- or tri-lingual writers like Joseph Conrad, C. P. Cavafy, or Samuel Beckett (who themselves are not strictly comparable). Long years in a foreign country can diminish the spontaneity with which the expatriate conjures up his mother tongue, as well as strip a native vocabulary of its deposit of slang; yet no writer or poet experiences this evolution in the same ways. As soon as Brodsky was deported from the Soviet Union, he became cognizant of the linguistic enfeeblement potentially threatening him. In a poem dated the year of his exile, and thus referring to the United States, he states: "here I'll live out my days, losing gradually / hair, teeth, consonants, verbs, and suffixes." By 1988, as he is co-translating the first of the "Twenty Sonnets to Mary, Queen of Scots," he notes: "I'll stuff the old gun full of classic grape- / shot, squandering what remains of Russian speech / on your pale shoulders and your paler nape." (This is by no means the unique line where Brodsky, who puns as much with words as with entire poetic forms, divides a end-word into an enjambment and makes, not only a wisecrack, but also a rhyme.)

In contrast to other exiled writers who lock themselves up inside their mother tongue so as to protect their creativity, Brodsky delved headlong into the enticements of his second language, while continuing to write in Russian. Expatriates who, like him, embrace an adopted language with less anxiety, sometimes learn to pass back and forth, without inhibition, between literary and "low" levels of the second language (most notably when swearing or making declarations of love)—all while remaining linguistic puritans or purists in their native tongues. An irrepressible rebel from his adolescence onwards, Brodsky probably precociously seized such extensive poetic freedom, in Russian, that he did not really need this supplementary boost. At any rate, as an English-language poet and self-translator, Brodsky dared to wander farther, into American slang and even regionalisms, than nearly all other foreign writers who have adopted our language. He was perhaps a victim of this intrepidity from time to time. A telling example is his recurrent, not always euphonic, use of the verb "to ape," meaning "to imitate." In his defense, it is true that he often uses animal and, even more often, fish metaphors, usually while poking fun at a mankind hardly evolved, in manners, from our primate ancestors. In "Lullaby of Cape Cod," he remarks that "man survives like a fish, / stranded, beached, but intent / on adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish, / wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then / to depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen) / for the interior, the heart of the continent."

A glimpse into the poet's private life is given in this allegorical scene, as occasionally elsewhere in a poetry otherwise eschewing direct confession, all while remaining idiosyncratically personal in its tonalities and diction. "Odysseus to Telemachus" provides another instance of concealed avowal. That poem and a few others allude metaphorically to the long-lost son, from a failed marriage, whom Brodsky left behind in Russia when he emigrated. Such verse offers unexpected poignant moments in an oeuvre often leaping between philosophical high seriousness, melancholic lucidity, joking, celebrations of serendipity, and more discreet acknowledgements of good fortune. "It's strange to think of surviving," he admits almost in passing, in one poem, "but that's what happened." Yet whereas few poets have so adamantly championed individual liberty and free will, there are a surprising number of references to destiny in Brodsky; and they arise in settings not necessarily associated with Greeks and Romans, or their fatalistic philosophies. Sometimes the Jewish-born poet addresses a Roman god, and there are remarkable Christmas poems based on the New Testament.

Brodsky famously read American slang dictionaries, hunting for eccentric images and possible rhymes. The results are sometimes words, or juxtapositions of words, that test the limits of poetic license. This is the vague criterion that has made some of us wrinkle our brows: when does the foreign poet, writing in English, trespass boundaries of legitimate linguistic inventiveness? For which lines, for which exact words, should Brodsky perhaps have heeded the (presumable) doubts of his co-translators or first Anglophone readers? In "May 24, 1980," translated by the author, Brodsky seemingly recalls his open-heart surgery: "Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty." Note the proximity of the literary "thrice" and the slang "nitty-gritty." Note the knives that "rake." Note the way "nitty-gritty" has become, in Brodsky's mind, a synonym of, say, "guts." Of course, the poet is making a philosophical point: "nitty-gritty," in the meaning the term takes on in the expression "getting down to the nitty-gritty," posits the body—in general, matter—as the ultimate horizon or dead-end of existence. In any event, Brodsky's mature poetry, whether written directly in English, or translated by himself from Russian originals, sometimes raises these stylistic and lexical questions. At times the questions become barriers, however slight or surmountable, to a full appreciation of a poem. This is much less true of his prose.

Of course, this dissonant, jubilant, linguistic provocativeness is pure Brodsky. His Marxist censors quite rightly designated him as a glaringly bright tumor infesting the cruelly policed, self-censoring drabness of socialist realism. He obviously aims at teasing readers with words or images that are out of kilter; and, once again, one suspects the gratitude and glee with which he must have welcomed oddities into his lines. "Letters to a Roman Friend" is a free adaptation of (or evocation of) verse by Martial. Here the translator, George L. Kline, surely working with Brodsky's approval, writes:

Given the classical setting, the colloquial "hairdo" amuses, as it jars, the ear—a lively twist reminiscent of Martial's own Latin poetry. Even more exuberantly grating is this wacky pastiche, translated by the author, of both children's fables and Homer's "rose-fingered dawn": "Like the mouse creeping out of the scarlet crack, / the sunset gnaws hungrily the electric / cheese of the outskirts."

What is at stake, philosophically, in such a style? What is the underlying implication of Brodsky's typical alignments of disparate perceptions? In what way do his poems, frequently commemorating a specific date or occasion and rigorously modeled on a classical poetic form, cohere in detail? Are the details linked to one another? Why do separate perceptions so often, in Brodsky, tend to remain closed off, or almost, from others in the same poem? Here is an example from "Lullaby of Cape Cod":

Countless similar passages gather sundry sense perceptions around a single moment of passing time—a moment thereby revealed in all its frenetic complexity. Yet what lies beyond this complexity? Between the lines, between these acute and compact "accelerations," lurks the void. Each highly crafted line, combining images, thoughts, and sensations, acts as a butterfly-like "buffer" preserving us from nothingness; yet the remarkable lack of transitions, in much of Brodsky's poetry, can slowly but surely make us aware of an ominous, interpenetrating emptiness traversing the entire oeuvre. The poem "Nature morte" explicitly confirms this mode:

For all the pleasure that we derive from Brodsky's poems, these glimpses into the abyss can leave us with lasting tremors. In a relatively late poem, "An Admonition," he confronts this troubling, fundamental dichotomy, in which he eventually discerns a justification for writing:

Such a responsibility demands great courage. It is no easy thing to adopt this "criterion of emptiness" as one's poetics, indeed as one's raison d'être. For Brodsky, his ability to imagine his own permanent absence, his self-effacement, while feeling the deepest gratitude for existing, was probably the rich personal and philosophical quality that made all the difference in what must have been, at times, an excruciating inner duel. It is to his honor that his affirming propensities were finally able to overcome, in nearly every poem, a no less compelling attraction to nothingness—even as the dizzy, admiring the landscape, strive not to be drawn over the ledge, into the chasm.