Note: Số LR Sept
2018 có bài về cuốn Thuỷ Ấn, của Brodsky, chôm về đây, tính sau.
Post thêm hai
bài thơ trên số NYRB Oct 25, dịch sau.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/world-enough-outside
John Burnside
World Enough Outside
Reading Joseph Brodsky's 'Watermark' in Venice
In 1992, Joseph
Brodsky published Watermark , a book-length essay that brings
together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any
other season – and a series of powerful and moving meditations on the writer’s
vocation. A lifelong Brodsky fan, I had read Watermark several times
since then, but never, until recently, in Venice itself. This June, over twenty
years after his death in 1996, sitting outside a cafe near the Ospedale, I read
again the passage in which he describes how ‘being sidetracked is literally a
matter of course’ in this city of echoes and water. I found myself sidetracked
too, not by a glint of light off the canal or by an echo, but by a sudden lull.
I looked up from the page to see a small funeral procession crossing the
lagoon, headed by a lugubre gondola , presumably making its way to the
cemetery island of San Michele, where I intended to spend that very afternoon,
visiting the graves of Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Brodsky himself.
For Brodsky, Venice was a winter city of cold water and colder stone, where
we are constantly haunted by our own reflections. But it seems to me that, amid
these reflections, the angels are never very far away. I am not talking about
the painted ones, much less those carved in marble; I mean the commonplace
angels of folklore and everyday life, those fleeting and indifferent spirits
who pass through a gap in conversation, or that more personal Geist who
hovers at my back when I am obliged to stop and catch my breath, overcome by
the heat in some sun-blanked campo I have never seen before, though I
have spent a good few summers wandering this city, trying to stitch together
the several maps that have formed, as fragments, in my memory. The result of
all this sidetracking, according to Brodsky, is a wry form of libertà
negativa : ‘After a two-week stay – even at off-season rates – you become
both broke and selfless, like a Buddhist monk. At a certain age and in a
certain line of work, selflessness is welcome, not to say imperative.’
This remark seems to capture the essence of Brodsky’s work. I once spent
several hours in his company, back in the 1970s, an evening throughout which he
was extraordinarily kind to me, an unknown and utterly incompetent young poet.
He was the only writer from whom I have ever taken advice, not about form or subject
matter and not, I hope it goes without saying, about ‘how to get published’,
but with regard to the honour of the writer’s vocation, and the responsibility
to the world that pertains to those who use language. The bare fact is that he
encouraged me, a long time ago, for no reason. Watermark is full of
encouragement, especially about the power of the aesthetic: for example, noting
the dangers posed by developers to a city that is, in itself, a work of art,
Brodsky laments that ‘nothing has a greater future than money’, only to add, a
few pages later, that ‘beauty, a fait accompli by definition, always
defies the future, regarding it as nothing so much as an overblown, impotent
present’.
Much has been said and written about the ‘bravery’ of certain contemporary
writers, most frequently for marketing reasons, but Brodsky was genuinely a
courageous man, and not just in his resistance to the Soviet regime (asked by
the judge at his trial, ‘Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?’, he
replied, ‘No one. Who has enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?’).
Speaking of those winter sojourns in Venice, which allowed him to escape his
academic day job each year to ‘write a couple of poems, provided I could be
that lucky’, he says, ‘Happiness or unhappiness would simply come … It is a
virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one’s emotional
life. There’s always enough work to do, not to mention that there’s world
enough outside.’ It takes not just courage but a certain hard-won wisdom to trust
oneself so thoroughly to a vocation, but Brodsky is adamant that ‘aesthetic
sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable
than ethics’.
I think what he means by this is that, while ethics involves a process of
deliberation and action, the aesthetic sense is ‘autonomous’. We trust to the
aesthetic because there is ‘world enough outside’, and it is the world beyond
the self – in this book, the city of Venice – that matters. Watermark
opens with a Proustian recollection of freezing seaweed and ends with a moving
anecdote about W H Auden in old age; there is no doubt that the mood throughout
is stoical. Yet its closing sentence declares that ‘one’s love … is greater
than oneself’.
Reading it during a Venice June, I could not help wishing that Brodsky had
overcome his dislike of the ‘shorts-clad herds’ to spend a few weeks here in
the summer, when proximity to the water has a somewhat different effect than at
other times of year. True, as in winter, the eye dwells constantly on the play
of light and shade on the lagoon, but there is also something else at work, a
finer attunement of the nervous system to every movement and ripple and dunt in
the greater environment, as if the body has temporarily developed its own linea
lateralis , the invisible, tender radar that fish use to monitor their home
element.
That receptivity comes often in summer – as it did one afternoon, at a
garden party on Torcello, far from the ‘unmitigated emissions of hydrocarbons
and armpits’ of the Rialto. There, on yet another sidetrack, I found myself
standing alone at the edge of my host’s garden, scanning the reed beds and the
open water beyond in the hope of glimpsing a stork or a passing tern. The rest
of the party had gathered around the drinks table on the far side of the lawn.
Almost alone for a moment, I remembered my brief stint as an outfielder for the
most dismal cricket team in Northamptonshire, and the surprising pleasure of
being closer to the long grass than to the wicket, always on the point of
turning and walking away, but sufficiently well disposed to remain where I was,
shaded by the sycamore that bounded our sports field. Now, on one side of the
garden, just so far, and no further, from the others, I was implicated in the
intricate system that extends far and wide over this city of water, a matrix of
awareness woven into the reed beds or hanging latent in the narrowest canals,
in which the sudden rush of a speedboat passing the Arsenale or the slow
progress of a lugubre gondola registers as a ripple, shivering across
the lagoon for miles – and I remembered again Brodsky’s elegant closing
passage, where he reminds us that ‘we go and beauty stays. Because we are
headed for the future, while beauty is the eternal present.’
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