The Brodsky Paradox

With a mild malice that is far from innocent, the poet A.E. Housman observed that when readers say they like a poem, they usually mean they like something inside the poem: that is to say, its content or its meaning. As a poet whose poems, so he claimed, suddenly appeared in his head, pure in their poemhood as the driven snow, he was confident he knew what he was talking about. Nonetheless the distinction won’t do. Archibald MacLeish was similarly wide of the mark when he famously stated at the end of his poem “Ars Poetica” that:

A poem should not mean

But be.

Sounds OK? But. . . .

The poet Mallarme was closer to making the same point in a more reasonable yet more penetrating way. He told the painter Degas, who dabbled in sonnet writing and always claimed he had plenty of ideas for them, that “poetry, my dear Degas, is not made with ideas. It is made with words.”

Such matters are familiar to all students who have done a university course in poetry. But they seem worth considering again in relation to the great poet Joseph Brodsky, whose genius disconcerts the reader by not confining itself to the words that make poetry in his own native language. Brodsky, like Milton or Michelangelo, was a virtuoso in at least two languages, whereas most poets have enough to do to wring a sudden life, never seen or suspected before, from the words with which they and their readers are already familiar, making a tongue unknown in any other speech.

Pushkin, revered master of all Russian poets, Brodsky not least, showed his fellow-countrymen that their own simplest words can nonetheless become enchanted poetry. But Pushkin, like most upper-class Russians of his time, habitually used French when conversing with his peers or writing them letters; and his longest, liveliest and most sophisticated poem, “Eugene Onegin,” not only uses French terms and expressions but also has a deliberately cosmopolitan feel about it. Nabokov swore that it, and every other poem, could not be translated:

What is translation? On a platter

A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

But nonetheless he rendered it into his own sort of Nabokovese, an outlandish and exotic dialect designed--somewhat ironically--to render painstakingly each Russian word into its exact English equivalent.

Nabokov must have known this was an impossible task. A gifted prose writer in two languages, he wrote some of his novels in Russian, some in English. In each case, it was his own peculiar style and language, just as Joseph Conrad’s English is his own language, but he did not attempt to write the same book in both languages or to make the two mutually convertible. Brodsky attempted this much more daring task. To what extent has he succeeded?

Well, not entirely. Dr. Johnson observed that a dog dancing on its hind legs did not dance well: The wonder was that he did it at all. And when poetry is concerned, that “not entirely” is bound to be a fatal judgment. By the lights of Housman or Mallarme, a poem that does “not entirely” succeed in being a poem is not really one at all. But Brodsky, quite rightly, was not a bit abashed by that. His cosmopolitan poetry, whether written in Russian or in English, has a very great deal inside it, indeed is positively swarming: not only with striking sentiments but with actual things of all kinds. So, of course, in Byron’s “Don Juan” or Auden’s “Letter from Iceland.” These splendid tours de force do not care whether they are “entirely” poems or not, and they are the ones that Brodsky’s liveliest and most characteristic poems, like “Lullaby of Cape Cod” translated by Anthony Hecht, most clearly resemble.

Like Auden, his spiritual comrade and colleague by temperament and in performance, Brodsky had an almost obsessive relish for this world of things and objects. Kipling, for whose work he also used to express unbounded admiration, had a similar fondness: neither poet being exactly a stickler for total accuracy when carried away by the pleasures of detail. In “Collected Poems in English,” excellent notes supplied by the editor and translators reveal Brodsky’s habits here in a most engaging way. Editor Ann Kjellberg notes in her wise introduction that he was partial to “twists of language,” language and meaning in the cosmopolitan hinterland between several languages that sometimes gets twisted up with an almost surrealist insouciance.

A dignified statement embracing this point is made on the cover announcement by Susan Sontag, for whom Brodsky is a “world poet,” as accessible to readers like herself, who cannot read him in Russian, as he is to native speakers. He is a world poet because of the extraordinary velocity and density of material notation in his poetry, which he referred to as “accelerated thinking.”

Brodskyan velocity certainly converts speed into his own sort of exactness and literalness even though, as the notes to the poems reveal, there are plenty of ordinary errors, endearing rather than the reverse, in explanations duly marked either (au) for author or (trans) for translator. (The Tirpitz was not, as Brodsky informs us, a German destroyer but the most powerful battleship in the German fleet; nor was the Luger [misspelled “Lugar”] the standard issue automatic in the German army of World War II, as we are told by the translator.) But such errors are nugatory in world poetry: what matter are the sense they give the reader of a heady participation in the quicksilver mines of a world poet’s mind and their dazzling range of what Sontag correctly and soberly calls “cultural reference.”

Nor is there any error at all in the factuality of one of Brodsky’s finest poems. “On the Death of Zhukov” is elegy on a national scale, and it may be significant that this is not a world poem but one that refers only to Russian history and Russian preservation. Zhukov was the greatest of his country’s commanders in World War II, not only saving Stalingrad from the Germans but storming the German capital at the climax of the war in 1945. Brodsky deliberately follows the inspiration and the rhythmical movement of a fine poem by the 18th century poet Derzhavin, celebrating the death of Count A.V. Suvorov, the great general who commanded the Russian armies under Catherine the Great. Derzhavin’s poem is called “Snegir” (“The Bullfinch”), because, as Brodsky tells us, the bullfinch’s song resembles the notes of a military fife; and the meter of both poems resembles the slow and steady drumbeat of a funeral march. It is this formal sound which George Kline’s translation has managed miraculously to preserve: not the sound only but the steady and sober earnestness with which the poet emphasizes the depth of his own gratitude and admiration.

How much dark blood, soldier’s blood, did he spill then

on alien fields? Did he weep for his men?

As he lay dying, did he recall them--

swathed in civilian white sheets at the end?

He gives no answer. What will he tell them,

meeting in hell? “We were fighting to win.”

Zhukov’s right arm, which once was enlisted

in a just cause, will battle no more.

Sleep! Russian history holds, as is fitting,

space for the exploits of those who, though bold,

marching triumphant through foreign cities,

trembled in terror when they came home.

Marshal! These words will be swallowed by Lethe,

utterly lost, like your rough soldier’s boots.

Still, take this tribute, though it is little,

to one who somehow--here I speak truth

plain and aloud--has saved our embattled

homeland. Drum, beat! And shriek out, bullfinch fife!

However cosmopolitan, in a sense even Postmodern, Brodsky’s outlook and his poetry may have eventually become, he never felt that history--and Russian history in particular--had come to an end or had ceased to matter.

“On the Death of Zhukov” was written in London in 1974, when Brodsky (his father had been in the Russian Navy) was the still patriotic exile that became his adopted role. He often refers to Ovid’s exile on the shores of the Black Sea, on the order of the emperor Augustus, as his own exile was ordered by the imperial decree of the Soviet rulers. But though he made exile his metier, he never lost a strong and passionate feeling for his homeland and its history of tribulations. Zhukov’s military genius was in the class of Hannibal, but his last days found him fallen and disgraced, like Pompey and Belisarius.

Brodsky’s relation to his many translators was a complex one. He rightly praises them and excuses the fact that, when he took back a poem for further treatment, he sometimes lost whatever smoothness his translators had achieved in his desire to bring it back closer to the original. This is not necessarily very helpful. The fact is that Brodsky’s poetic ear for English was not, could not be, as unerring as his ear for the melodies and nuances of his native tongue. To be frank, many of the poems which he either revised in his own English or wrote independently as “English” poems do not sound right at all.

Sometimes, as with Byron or Browning or Hardy, their way of not sounding right has something quirky and inspired about it, but all too often the result is a mishmash in which is lost what Brodsky’s friend Auden remarked was the one certain thing that defined poetry: It should be “memorable speech.” However vividly kaleidoscopic it may be in its geographical and cultural references, a long ambitious poem like “Lullaby of Cape Cod” is not in this sense memorable, nor is it metrically and verbally felicitous. Indeed, it can sound rather as if written by a cosmopolitan committee instead of by a Russian poet, with a fine ear in his native language, who has come to live in America and is fascinated by his own reaction to a new and astonishing country.

At the same time, the poem draws in the reader hypnotically, as did Brodsky’s early poems in Russian which Auden so much admired. The English poet remarked that they had the “gift of silence,” even in translation, particularly the poems which reveal Brodsky’s enthusiasm at the time for the manner of the English metaphysical poets. “Lullaby of Cape Cod” has a paradoxical relationship with Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day.” In both poems the poet is as if physically paralyzed by his own sense of the moment and yet able to reflect on it as if he were describing the progress of a dream:

It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stoplight

in its journey to the whiskey across the room

on the nightstand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom

goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,

comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,

rolled-up road map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.

Brodsky’s puckish humor, embodied in the recurrent image of the great codfish of Cape Cod, is his brightest asset and one that seems to come across infallibly in translation. Here it counterpoints the nothingness into which poet and poem are inexorably drifting. (Brodsky, incidentally, suffered from a weak heart all his life and underwent at least two bypass operations.)

Whatever may be in store,

for good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings

depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.

The cod has swum out of the sea, assumed an upright posture and is now no doubt turning a glaucous eye on the nearly empty whiskey bottle.

Brodsky’s extraordinary mind, almost too “Alice in Wonderland”-like in its wanderings, baffles the reader at first by these vagaries. But as the poem comes closer and becomes more intimate with us in each rereading, it reveals the full depth, so to speak, of its frivolity. The paradox is wholly Brodskyan; and it is one which Brodsky’s soul mate Auden would have not only understood but would have taken for granted.