Joseph Brodsky, The Art of Poetry No. 28
Brodsky kể là ông đọc thơ Auden khi bị lưu đầy nội xứ, và cùng lúc khám phá ra cõi thơ “sắp có” của chính ông. Gấu, phải đi tù Vẹm mới nhận ra được cái hồn cõi thơ văn của Miền Nam ở trong nhạc sến, “ngày mai qua cơn mê”, hay, “ngày mai đi nhận xác chồng”.
Hay là khi ông [Brodsky] được hỏi quen biết Solz ra làm sao:
INTERVIEWER
Were you familiar with Solzhenitsyn at that time?
BRODSKY
I don’t think at that time Solzhenitsyn was familiar with himself. No, later on. When "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was put out, I read it instantly. I remember, speaking of Akhmatova, talking about "One Day", and a friend of mine said “I don’t like this book.” Akhmatova said: “What kind of comment is that—‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’? The point is that the book ought to be read by two hundred million of the Russian population.” And that’s it, ya?
“Thơ ở đâu xa” là thứ hàng triệu triệu tên Mít sau này sẽ đọc, đúng ý của NL, khi coi nó là bia mộ của cả 1 thời
INTERVIEWER
Were you familiar with Solzhenitsyn at that time?
BRODSKY
I don’t think at that time Solzhenitsyn was familiar with himself. No, later on. When "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was put out, I read it instantly. I remember, speaking of Akhmatova, talking about "One Day", and a friend of mine said “I don’t like this book.” Akhmatova said: “What kind of comment is that—‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’? The point is that the book ought to be read by two hundred million of the Russian population.” And that’s it, ya?
“Thơ ở đâu xa” là thứ hàng triệu triệu tên Mít sau này sẽ đọc, đúng ý của NL, khi coi nó là bia mộ của cả 1 thời
Interviewed
by Sven Birkerts
Joseph
Brodsky was interviewed in his Greenwich Village apartment in December,
1979.
He was unshaven and looked harried. He was in the midst of correcting
the
galley proofs for his book—A Part of Speech—and he said that he had
already
missed every conceivable deadline. The floor of his living room was
cluttered
with papers. It was offered to do the interview at a more convenient
time, but
Brodsky would not hear of it.
The walls
and free surfaces of his apartment were almost entirely obscured by
books,
postcards, and photographs. There were a number of pictures of a
younger
Brodsky, with Auden and Spender, with Octavio Paz, with various
friends. Over
the fireplace were two framed photographs, one of Anna Akhmatova,
another of
Brodsky with his son, who remains in Russia.
Brodsky made
two cups of strong instant coffee. He sat in a chair stationed beside
the
fireplace and kept the same basic pose for three hours—head tilted,
legs crossed,
the fingers of his right hand either holding a cigarette or resting on
his
chest. The fireplace was littered with cigarette butts. Whenever he was
tired
of smoking he would fling his cigarette in that direction.
His answer
to the first question did not please him. Several times he said: “Let’s
start
again.” But about five minutes into the interview he seemed to have
forgotten
that there was a tape recorder, or for that matter, an interviewer. He
picked
up speed and enthusiasm.
Brodsky’s
voice, which Nadezhda Mandelstam once described as a “remarkable
instrument,”
is nasal and very resonant.
During a
break Brodsky asked what kind of beer the interviewer would like and
set out
for the corner store. As he was returning through the back courtyard
one of his
neighbors called out: “How are you, Joseph? You look like you’re losing
weight.” “I don’t know,” answered Brodsky’s voice. “Certainly I’m
losing my
hair.” A moment later he added: “And my mind.”
When the
interview was finished Brodsky looked relaxed, not at all the same man
who had
opened the door four hours before. He seemed reluctant to stop talking.
But
then the papers on the floor began to claim his attention. “I’m awfully
glad we
did this,” he said. He saw the interviewer out the door with his
favorite
exclamation: “Kisses!”
INTERVIEWER
I wanted to
start with a quotation from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s book, Hope Abandoned.
She
says of you, “He is . . . a remarkable young man who will come to a bad
end, I
fear.”
JOSEPH BRODSKY
In a way I
have come to a bad end. In terms of Russian literature—in terms of
being
published in Russia. However, I think she had in mind something of a
worse
denomination—namely, physical harm. Still, for a writer not to be
published in
his mother tongue is as bad as a bad end.
INTERVIEWER
Did
Akhmatova have any predictions?
BRODSKY
Perhaps she
did, but they were nicer, I presume, and therefore I don’t remember
them.
Because you only remember bad things—you pay attention to them because
they
have more to do with you than your work. On the other hand, good things
are
originated by a kind of divine intervention. And there’s no point in
worrying
about divine intervention, because it’s either going to happen or it’s
not.
Those things are out of your control. What’s under your control is the
possibility of the bad.
INTERVIEWER
INTERVIEWER
To what
extent are you using divine intervention as a kind of psychic metaphor?
BRODSKY
Actually to
a large extent. What I mean actually is the intervention of language
upon you
or into you. That famous line of Auden’s about Yeats: “mad Ireland hurt
you
into poetry—” What “hurts” you into poetry or literature is language,
your
sense of language. Not your private philosophy or your politics, nor
even the
creative urge, or youth.
INTERVIEWER
So, if
you’re making a cosmology you’re putting language at the apex?
BRODSKY
Well, it’s
no small thing—it’s pretty grand. When they say “the poet hears the
voice of
the Muse,” it’s nonsense if the nature of the Muse is unspecified. But
if you
take a closer look, the voice of the Muse is the voice of the language.
It’s a
lot more mundane than the way I’m putting it. Basically, it’s one’s
reaction to
what one hears, what one reads.
INTERVIEWER
Your use of
that language—it seems to me—is to relate a vision of history running
down,
coming to a dead end.
BRODSKY
That might
be. Basically, it’s hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only
prompted
by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of
assessing
himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main
interest
is the nature of time. That’s what interests me most of all. What time
can do
to a man. That’s one of the closest insights into the nature of time
that we’re
allowed to have.
INTERVIEWER
In your
piece on St. Petersburg you speak of water as a “condened form of time.”
BRODSKY
Ya, it’s
another form of time . . . it was kind of nice, that piece, except that
I never
got proofs to read and quite a lot of mistakes crept in, misspellings
and all
those things. It matters to me. Not because I’m a perfectionist, but
because of
my love affair with the English language.
INTERVIEWER
How do you
think you fare as your own translator? Do you translate or rewrite?
BRODSKY
No, I
certainly don’t rewrite. I may redo certain translations, which causes
a lot of
bad blood with translators, because I try to restore in translation
even those
things which I regard as weaknesses. It’s a maddening thing in itself
to look
at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening. So,
before
doing that you have to cool off a great deal, and when you start you
are
looking upon your work as the soul looks from its abode upon the
abandoned
body. The only thing the soul perceives is the slow smoking of decay.
So, you
don’t really have any attachment to it. When you’re translating, you
try to
preserve the sheen, the paleness of those leaves. And you accept how
some of
them look ugly, but then perhaps when you were doing the original that
was
because of some kind of strategy. Weaknesses have a certain function in
a poem
. . . some strategy in order to pave the reader’s way to the impact of
this or
that line.
INTERVIEWER
Do you get
very sensitive about the way someone renders you into English?
BRODSKY
My main
argument with translators is that I care for accuracy and they’re very
often
inaccurate—which is perfectly understandable. It’s awfully hard to get
these
people to render the accuracy as you would want them to. So rather than
brooding
about it, I thought perhaps I would try to do it myself.
Besides, I
have the poem in the original, that’s enough. I’ve done it and for
better or
worse it stays there. My Russian laurels—or lack of them—satisfy me
enough. I’m
not after a good seat on the American Parnassus. The thing that bothers
me
about many of those translations is that they are not very good
English. It may
have to do with the fact that my affair with the English language is
fairly
fresh, fairly new, and therefore perhaps I’m subject to some extra
sensitivity.
So what bothers me is not so much that the line of mine is bad—what
bothers me
is the bad line in English.
Some
translators espouse certain poetics of their own. In many cases their
understanding of modernism is extremely simple. Their idea, if I reduce
it to
the basics, is “staying loose.” I, for one, would rather sound trite
than slack
or loose. I would prefer to sound like a cliché . . . an ordered
cliché, rather
than a clever slackness.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been
translated by some impeccable craftsmen—
BRODSKY
I was quite
lucky on several occasions. I was translated by both Richard Wilbur and
Anthony
Hecht—
INTERVIEWER
Well, I was
at a reading recently where Wilbur was describing to the audience—quite
tartly,
I thought—how you and Derek Walcott were flying in a plane over Iowa,
recorrecting his translation of one of your poems—which did not make
him happy
. . .
BRODSKY
True. The
poem only profited out of that. I respect him enormously. Having asked
him to
do certain passages three, four, or more times, I merely felt that I
had no
human right to bother him with that one more time. I just didn’t have
the guts.
Even that uncorrected version was excellent. It’s more or less the same
thing
when I said no to Wystan Auden when he volunteered to translate some
poems. I
thought, “Who the hell am I to be translated by Wystan?”
INTERVIEWER
That’s an
interesting reversal—the poet feeling inadequate to his translator.
BRODSKY
Ya, well,
that’s the point. I had the same sentiment with respect to Dick Wilbur.
INTERVIEWER
When did you
begin to write?
BRODSKY
I started to
write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about
twenty-three,
I didn’t take it that seriously. Sometimes people say, “The best things
you
have written were when you were nineteen.” But I don’t think I’m a
Rimbaud.
INTERVIEWER
What was
your poetic horizon then? Did you know of Frost, or Lowell?
BRODSKY
No. But
eventually, I got to all of them, first in translation, then in the
original.
My first acquaintance with Robert Frost was when I was twenty-two. I
got some
of his translations, not in a book, again, from some friends of
mine—well, this
is the way you get things—and I was absolutely astonished at the
sensibility,
that kind of restraint, that hidden, controlled terror. I couldn’t
believe what
I’d read. I thought I ought to look into the matter closely, ought to
check
whether the translator was really translating, or whether we had on our
hands a
kind of genius in Russian. And so I did, and it was all there, as much
as I
could detect it. And with Frost it all started.
INTERVIEWER
What were
you getting in school up until then—Goethe, Schiller?
BRODSKY
We got the
whole thing. The English poets would be Byron and Longfellow,
nineteenth-century-oriented. Classics, so to speak. You wouldn’t hear
anything
about Emily Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins or anyone else. They
give you
two or three foreign figures and that’s about it.
INTERVIEWER
Did you even
know the name “Eliot”?
BRODSKY
We all knew
the name Eliot. (laughs) For any Eastern European, Eliot is a kind of
Anglo-Saxon brand name.
INTERVIEWER
Like Levi’s?
BRODSKY
Ya, like
Levi’s. We all knew there was a poet Eliot, but it was very hard to get
any
stuff of his. The first attempt to translate him was made in 1936,
1937, in an
anthology of English poetry; the translation was quite hapless. But
since we
knew his reputation we read more into the lines than there ever was—at
least in
Russian. So . . . immediately after the accomplishment the translators
got
executed or imprisoned, of course, and the book was out of circulation.
However, I
managed to make my way through it gradually, picking up English by
arming
myself with a dictionary. I went through it line by line because,
basically, at
the age of twenty, twenty-three, I knew more or less all of the Russian
poetry
and had to look somewhere else. Not because Russian poetry ceased to
satisfy
me, but once you’ve read the texts you know them . . .
INTERVIEWER
Then you
were translating too?
BRODSKY
That was the
way of making a living. I was translating all kinds of nonsense. I was
translating Poles, Czechs, brother Slavs, but then I ventured across
the
borders; I began to translate Spanish poetry. I was not doing it alone.
In
Russia there is a huge translating industry, and lots of things weren’t
yet
translated. In introductions or critical essays you would encounter the
name of
an obscure poet who had not been translated and you would begin to hunt
for
him.
Then I began
to translate English poetry, Donne especially. When I was sent to that
internal
exile in the north, a friend of mine sent me two or three anthologies
of
American poetry . . . Oscar Williams, with the pictures, which would
fire my
imagination. With a foreign culture, a foreign realm that you think you
are
never going to see, your love affair is a lot more intense.
So I was
doing those things, reading, translating, approximating rather than
translating
. . . until finally I came here to join the original (laughs) . . .
came too
close to the original.
INTERVIEWER
Have you
lost any of the admirations you had? Do you still feel the same way
about
Donne, Frost?
BRODSKY
About Donne
and Frost I feel the same way. I feel slightly less about Eliot, much
less
about e. e. cummings . . .
INTERVIEWER
There was a
point, then, when cummings was a very impressive figure?
BRODSKY
Ya, because
modernism is very high, the avant-garde thing, trickery and all that.
And I
used to think about it as a most desirable goal to achieve.
I lost a lot
of idols, say, Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters. However, some things got
reinforced,
like Marvell, Donne . . . I’m naming just a few but it deserves a much
more
thorough conversation . . . and Edwin Arlington Robinson, for instance.
Not to
speak of Thomas Hardy.
INTERVIEWER
When did you
first run into an Auden poem?
BRODSKY
In 1965. I
was in that village, in that internal exile I had been sent to. I’d
written
several poems, a couple of which I sent to the man who did the
translations of
Frost that had impressed me so much—I regard his opinion as the highest
judgment, even though there is very little communication—and he told
me, “This
poem of yours”—he was talking about “Two Hours in the Empty
Tank”—“really
resembles Auden in its sense of humor.” I said, “Ya?” (laughs) The next
thing,
I was trying to get hold of Auden. And then I did and I began to read.
INTERVIEWER
What part of
Auden’s work did you first encounter?
BRODSKY
I don’t
really remember—certainly “In Memory of Yeats.” In the village I came
across
that poem . . . I kind of liked it, especially the third part, ya? That
“Earth,
receive an honored guest” kind of ballad-cum-Salvation Army hymn. And
short
meter. I showed it to a friend of mine and he said, “Is it possible
that they
write better than ourselves?” I said, “Looks like.”
The next
thing, I decided to write a poem, largely aped from Auden’s structure
in “In
Memory of W. B. Yeats.” However, I didn’t look into Auden any closer at
that
point. And then I came to Moscow and showed that friend of mine, the
translator, these poems. Once more, he said, “This resembles Auden.” So
I went
out and found Auden’s poems and began to read him more thoroughly.
What
interests me is his symptomatic technique of description. He never
gives you
the real . . . ulcer . . . he talks about its symptoms, ya? He keeps
his eye
all the time on civilization, on the human condition. But he doesn’t
give you
the direct description of it, he gives you the oblique way. And then
when you
read a line like “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day”—well,
things
begin to change. (laughs)
INTERVIEWER
What about
your younger years? How did you first come to think about writing
poetry?
BRODSKY
At the ages
of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I didn’t write much, not at all,
actually. I
was drifting from job to job, working. At sixteen I did a lot of
traveling. I
was working with a geological expedition. And those years were when
Russians
were extremely interested in finding uranium. So, every geological team
was
given some sort of Geiger device. I walked a lot. The whole thing was
done on
foot. So you’d cover about thirty kilometers daily through pretty thick
swamps.
INTERVIEWER
Which part
of Russia?
BRODSKY
Well, all
parts, actually. I spent quite a lot of time in Irkutsk, north of the
Amur
River on the border of China. Once during a flood I even went to China.
It’s
not that I wanted to, but the raft with all our things on it drifted to
the
right bank of the Amur River. So I found myself in China briefly. And
then I
was in Central Asia, in deserts, as well as in the mountains—the Tien
Shan
mountains are pretty tall mountains, the northwest branch of the Hindu
Kush.
And, also, in the northern part of European Russia, that is, by the
White Sea,
near Arkhangelsk. Swamps, dreadful swamps. Not that the swamps
themselves were
dreadful, but the mosquitoes! So, I’ve done that. Also, in Central Asia
I was
doing a little bit of mountain climbing. I was pretty good at that, I
must say.
Well, I was young . . . so, I had covered a good deal of territory,
with those
geological teams and mountain-climbing groups. When they first arrested
me, in
1959, I think, they tried to threaten me by saying, “We’re going to
send you
far away, where no human foot ever trod.” Well, I wasn’t terribly
impressed
because I had already been to many of the regions they were talking
about. When
they indeed sent me to one of those places, it turned out to be an area
which I
knew somewhat well, climatically anyhow. That was near the polar
circle, near
the same White Sea. So, to me it was some sort of déjà vu.
INTERVIEWER
Still, there
must be a pretty strong thread leading from the top of the mountain to
your
meeting Akhmatova.
BRODSKY
In my third
or fourth year doing geology I got into writing poems. I started
because I saw
a book of poems a colleague of mine had. The subject matter was the
romantic
appeal of all those spaces. At least that’s what it seemed to me. I
thought
that I could do better, so I started writing my own poetry. Which
wasn’t really
terribly good . . . well, some people kind of liked it, but then again
everybody who writes finds himself an audience. Oddly enough, ya? All
the
literati keep at least one imaginary friend—and once you start to write
you’re
hooked. Still, all the same, at that time I had to make my living. So I
kept
partaking in those travels. It was not so much that they paid well, but
in the
field you spent much less; therefore your salary was just waiting for
you.
I would get
this money and return home and live on it for a while. Usually by
Christmastime
or New Year’s the money would run out and I would start to look for a
job. A
normal operation, I think. And in one of my last travels, which was
again to
the far eastern part of the country, I got a volume of a poet of
Pushkin’s
circle, though in ways much better than Pushkin—his name is Baratynsky.
Reading
him forced me to abandon the whole silly traveling thing and to get
more
seriously into writing. So this is what I started to do. I returned
home
prematurely and started to write a really quite good poem, the way I
remember
it.
INTERVIEWER
I read once
in a book about Leningrad poets a description of your lair, the
lampshade
covered with Camel cigarette packs . . .
BRODSKY
That was the
place where I lived with my parents. We had one big, huge room in the
communal
apartment, partitioned by two arches. I simply stuffed those arches
with all
kinds of bookshelves, furniture, in order to separate myself from my
parents. I
had my desk, my couch. To a stranger, to a foreigner especially, it
looked
really like a cave; you had to walk through a wooden wardrobe with no
back,
like a kind of a gate. I lived there quite a lot. However, I used every
bit of
money that I made to try to rent or sublet a place for myself, merely
because
at that age you would rather live someplace other than with your
parents, ya?
Girls, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
How was it
that you finally came to meet Akhmatova?
BRODSKY
It was in
1961, I think. By that time I’d befriended two or three people who
later played
a very big role in my life—what later came to be known as “the
Petersburg
circle.” There were about four of us. One of them is still, I think,
the best
poet Russia has today. His name is Evgeny Rein; the name comes from the
Rhine
River. He taught me a lot in terms of poetic know-how. Not that he
taught. I
would read his poems and he would read mine and we would sit around and
have
high-minded exchanges, pretending we knew a lot more than we did; he
knew
something more because he was five years senior to me. At that age it
matters
considerably. He once said the thing which I would normally say to any
poet—that if you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives
should
be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns—even
the
verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that
removes
adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should
be dark
with nouns. To a point I have followed that advice, though not exactly
religiously. It did me a lot of good, I must say.
INTERVIEWER
You have a
poem which says “Evgeny mine . . .”
BRODSKY
Ya, it is
addressed to him, within that cycle “Mexican Divertimento.” But I’ve
written
several poems to him, and to a certain extent he remains . . . what’s
Pound’s
description: “il miglior fabbro.” One summer, Rein said: “Would you
like to
meet Akhmatova?” I said: “Well, why not?” without thinking much. At
that time I
didn’t care much for Akhmatova. I got a book and read through it, but
at that
time I was pretty much in my own idiotic world, wrapped up in my own
kind of
things. So . . . we went there, actually two or three times. I liked
her very
much. We talked about this and that, and I showed her some of my poems
without
really caring what she would say.
But
I remember one evening returning from her
place—it was in the outskirts of Leningrad—in a filled-up train.
Suddenly—it
was like the seven veils let down—I realized who it was I was dealing
with. And
after that I saw her quite often.
Then in 1964
I got behind bars and didn’t see her; we exchanged some kind of
correspondence.
I got released because she was extremely active in trying to get me
out. To a
certain extent she had blamed herself for my arrest, basically because
of the
harassment; she was being followed, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody
thinks that
way about themselves; even I in my turn later on was trying to be kind
of
cautious with people, because my place was being watched.
INTERVIEWER
Does that
phenomenon give you a strange sense of self-importance?
BRODSKY
It really
doesn’t. It either scares you or it is a nuisance. You can’t derive any
sense
of self-importance because you understand a) how idiotic it is, and b)
how
dreadful it is. The dreadfulness dominates your thoughts. Once, I
remember
Akhmatova conversing with somebody, some naive woman, or perhaps not so
naive,
who asked, “Anna Andreyevna—how do you notice if you are being
followed?” To
which she replied: “My dear, it’s impossible not to notice such a
thing.” It’s
done to intimidate you. You don’t have to suffer persecution mania. You
really
are being followed.
INTERVIEWER
How long did
it take you to get rid of that feeling once you landed in Austria?
BRODSKY
It’s still
around, you’re cautious. In your writing, in your exchanges with
people,
meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, et
cetera.
Because it’s all penetrated, not necessarily by the direct agents of
State
Security, but by those people who can be used for that.
INTERVIEWER
Were you
familiar with Solzhenitsyn at that time?
BRODSKY
I don’t
think at that time Solzhenitsyn was familiar with himself. No, later
on. When
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was put out, I read it
instantly. I
remember, speaking of Akhmatova, talking about One Day, and a friend of
mine
said “I don’t like this book.” Akhmatova said: “What kind of comment is
that—‘I
like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’? The point is that the book ought to be
read by
two hundred million of the Russian population.” And that’s it, ya?
I followed
Solzhenitsyn’s output in the late sixties quite steadily. By 1971,
there were
about five or six books floating around in manuscript. Gulag wasn’t yet
published. August 1914 surfaced at that time. Also his prose poems,
which I
found absolutely no good. But we like him not for his poetry, ya?
INTERVIEWER
Have you
ever met him?
BRODSKY
No. We had
one exchange in the mail . . . I really think that in him the Soviet
rule got
its Homer: what he managed to reveal, the way he kind of pulled the
world a
little bit around, ya?
INTERVIEWER
Insofar as
any one person is able to do anything—
BRODSKY
That’s about
it, ya? But then you have the millions of dead behind him. The force of
the
individual who is alive grows proportionately—it’s not him essentially,
but
them.
INTERVIEWER
When you
were sent to the prison camp in 1965 . . .
BRODSKY
It was an
internal exile, not a camp. It was a village, fourteen people, lost,
completely
lost in bogs up there in the north. With almost no access. First I went
through
transitory prisons: Crosses.* Then it was Vologda, then Arkhangelsk,
and
finally I ended up in that village. It was all under guard.
INTERVIEWER
Were you
able to maintain an ongoing picture of yourself as someone who uses
language?
BRODSKY
That’s a
funny thing, but I did. Even sitting there between those walls, locked
up, then
being moved from place to place, I was writing poems. One of them was a
very
presumptuous poem—precisely about that, being a carrier of the
language—extremely presumptuous as I say, but I was in the height of
the tragic
mood and I could say something like that about myself, to myself even.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have
any sense at that time that what had happened at the trial had already
put you
in the international spotlight?
BRODSKY
No, I knew
nothing about the international echo of that trial, nothing at all. I
realized
that I got a great deal of shit on my palate—on my plate—on my palate
as well
(laughs). I had to do my stretch . . . What’s more, that was the time
which
coincided in an unfortunate way—but then again it was fortunate for
me—with my
greatest personal trouble, with a girl, et cetera, et cetera . . . and
a kind
of triangle overlapped severely with the squares of the solitary
confinements,
ya? It was a kind of geometry—with vicious circles.
I was more
fired up by that personal situation than by what was happening to my
body. The
displacement from one cell to another, one prison to another,
interrogation,
all that, I didn’t really pay much attention to it.
INTERVIEWER
Were you
able to stay in some sort of communication with the literati once you
were sent
into internal exile?
BRODSKY
I was
trying. Mailing things in a kind of roundabout fashion, or directly.
Sometimes
I even called. I was living in a “village.” Fourteen little shacks.
Certainly
it was obvious that some letters were not read by my eyes alone. But,
you know
that you are up against it; you know who is the master of your house.
It’s not
you. So therefore you’re resigned to trying to ridicule the system—but
that’s
about as much as can be done. You feel like a serf bitching about the
gentry,
which has its own entertaining aspects.
INTERVIEWER
But still a
situation in which you must have been under extreme duress—
BRODSKY
No, I
wasn’t. In the first place I was young. Secondly, the work was
agriculture. My
old joke is that agriculture is like public transportation in the U.S.
It’s a
sporadic operation, poorly organized. So therefore you have enough
time, ya?
Sometimes it was pretty taxing, physically, that is; and also, it was
unpleasant. I didn’t have the right to leave. I was confined. Perhaps
because
of some turn in my character, I decided to get the most out of it. I
kind of
liked it. I associated it with Robert Frost. You think about the
environment,
the surroundings, what you’re doing: you start to play at being almost
a
gentleman farmer. Other Russian writers, I think, had it much harder
than me,
much harder.
INTERVIEWER
Did this
life give you the rural sense that you have?
BRODSKY
I love it.
It gives you more than the rural sense . . . because you get up in the
morning
in the village, or wherever, and you go to get your daily load, you
walk
through the field and you know that at the same time most of the nation
is doing
the same. It gives you some exhilarating sense of being with the rest.
If you
look from the height of a dove, or a hawk, across the nation you would
see it.
In that sense it was nice. It gives you a certain insight into the
basics of
life.
INTERVIEWER
Was there
anyone with whom you could talk literature?
BRODSKY
No—but I
didn’t need it, really. You don’t really need it, frankly. Or at least
I’m not
one of that kind of literary person. Although I love to talk about
those
things. But once shorn of that opportunity, it’s okay. Your democratic
traits
get set in motion. You talk to the people and try to appreciate what
they’re
saying, et cetera. It pays psychologically.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have
many classics at that point?
BRODSKY
Not really.
Nothing, in fact. When I needed references I had to write letters to
ask
people’s help. But I operate on a very basic level with the classics.
That is,
there’s nothing very esoteric. You can find all of it in Bullfinch, ya?
I’d
read Suetonius and somebody else—Tacitus. But I don’t remember, frankly.
INTERVIEWER
At some
point the classics must have been quite important. I don’t mean
specifically
the classics, as much as the historical reach . . .
BRODSKY
Whenever you
get in trouble you’re automatically forced to regard yourself—unless
you are
self-indulgent—as a kind of archetypal character. So, who else could I
think of
being but Ovid? That would be the most natural thing . . .
Well, that
was a wonderful time, I must say. I’d written quite a lot and I think I
had
written rather well. I remember one breakthrough I made with poetry. I
wrote
the line “here on the hills, under the empty sky, on the roads leading
on into
the woods, life steps aside from itself and peers at itself in a state
of bewilderment.”
This is perhaps not much, but to me it was important . . . it’s not
exactly a
new way of looking, but being able to say that unleashes certain other
things.
You are then invincible.
INTERVIEWER
You had no
intimation that you would ever reach the West?
BRODSKY
Oh, no. No
Russian has that intimation. You’re born to a very confined realm. The
rest of
the world is just pure geography, an academic discipline, not the
reality.
INTERVIEWER
When you
left Russia you were going to Israel.
BRODSKY
I had to go
to Israel! I was given the walking papers to Israel. But I had no
intention to
go anywhere. I landed in Vienna and Carl Proffer from the University of
Michigan, from Ardis, met me there. The first thing I saw when I looked
out of
the plane was his tall figure on the balustrade. We waved to each
other. And
the first thing he asked me as I walked up was, “Well, Joseph, where
would you
like to go?”
I said:
“Jesus, I haven’t the slightest idea.” And I really didn’t. I knew I
was
leaving my country for good, but for where, I had no idea whatsoever.
One thing
which was quite clear was that I didn’t want to go to Israel. I didn’t
know
Hebrew, though I knew a little English.
Besides, I
didn’t have much time to think about that. I never even believed that
they’d
allow me to go. I never believed they would put me on a plane, and when
they
did I didn’t know whether the plane would go east or west.
INTERVIEWER
Was Carl
Proffer trying to get you to come to the U.S.?
BRODSKY
When I told
him that I had no plans whatsoever, he asked, “Well, how would you like
to come
to the University of Michigan?” Other proposals came from London and
from the
Sorbonne, I believe. But I decided, “It’s a big change, let’s make it
really
big.” At that time they had expelled about 150 spies from England and I
thought, “That’s not all of them, ya?” (laughs) I didn’t want to be
hounded by
what was left of the Soviet Security Service in England. So I came to
the
States.
INTERVIEWER
Was Auden
actually in Vienna at the time?
BRODSKY
Auden wasn’t
in Vienna, but I knew that he was in Austria. He usually spent his
summertimes
in Kirchstetten. I had a gift for him. All I took out of Russia was my
typewriter, which they unscrewed bolt by bolt at the airport—that was
their way
of saying good-bye—a small Modern Library volume of Donne’s poems, and
a bottle
of vodka, which I thought that if I got to Austria I’d give to Auden.
If I
didn’t get to Austria I’d drink it myself. I also had a second bottle
from a
friend, a Lithuanian poet, Tomas Venclova—a remarkable poet, I
think—who gave
me a bottle of Lithuanian booze. He said, “Give this thing to Wystan if
you see
him.” So, I had two bottles, that typewriter, and Donne, along with a
change of
clothes, that is, underwear, and that was it.
On the third
or fourth day in Vienna I said to Carl, “Wystan Auden may be in
Austria—why
don’t we try to find him?” Since we had nothing to do except go to the
opera
and restaurants, we hired an Avis car, a VW, got a map of Austria, and
went to
look for him. The trouble was there are three Kirchstettens. We went
through
all of them, I think—miles and miles between them—and finally we
discovered the
Auden-Strasse, and found him there.
He began to
take immense care of me immediately. All of a sudden the telegrams in
my name
began to arrive in care of Auden, ya? He was trying to kind of set me
up. He
told me about whom to meet here and there, et cetera. He called Charles
Osborne
in London and got me invited to the Poetry International, 1972. I
stayed two
weeks in London, with Wystan at Stephen Spender’s place.
In general,
because in those eight years I was as well read in English poetry as in
Russian, I knew the scene rather well. Except that, for instance, I
didn’t know
that Wystan was gay. It somehow escaped me. Not that I care much about
that.
However, I was emerging from Russia and Russia being quite a Victorian
country,
that could have tinged my attitude toward Wystan. But I don’t think it
did.
I stayed two
weeks in London, and then I flew to the States.
INTERVIEWER
Your
connections in the world of poetry have proliferated. You’re friends
with
Hecht, Wilbur, Walcott—
BRODSKY
I met Derek
[Walcott] at Lowell’s funeral. Lowell had told me about Derek and
showed me
some poems which impressed me a great deal. I read them and I thought,
“Well,
another good poet.” Then his editor gave me that collection Another
Life. That
blew my mind completely. I realized that we have a giant on our hands.
He is
the figure in English poetry comparable to, well, should I say Milton?
(laughs)
Well, more accurately, I’d put him somewhere between Marlowe and
Milton,
especially because of his tendency to write verse plays, and his vigor.
He’s
astonishing. The critics want to make him a regional poet from the West
Indies,
and it’s a crime. Because he’s the grandest thing around.
INTERVIEWER
How about
Russian writers?
BRODSKY
I don’t know
really quite whom I react to most. I remember the great impact
Mandelstam’s
poetry had on me when I was nineteen or twenty. He was unpublished.
He’s still
largely unpublished and unheeded—in criticism and even in private
conversations, except for the friends, except for my circle, so to
speak.
General knowledge of him is extremely limited, if any. I remember the
impact of
his poetry on me. It’s still there. As I read it I’m sometimes
flabbergasted.
Another poet who really changed not only my idea of poetry, but also my
perception
of the world—which is what it’s all about, ya?—is Tsvetayeva. I
personally feel
closer to Tsvetayeva—to her poetics, to her techniques, which I was
never
capable of. This is an extremely immodest thing to say, but, I always
thought,
“Can I do the Mandelstam thing?” I thought on several occasions that I
succeeded at a kind of pastiche.
But
Tsvetayeva. I don’t think I ever managed to approximate her voice. She
was the
only poet—and if you’re a professional that’s what’s going on in your
mind—with
whom I decided not to compete.
INTERVIEWER
What was the
distinctive element that attracted you but also frustrated you?
BRODSKY
Well, it
never frustrated me. She’s a woman in the first place. But hers is the
most
tragic voice of all Russian poetry. It’s impossible to say she’s the
greatest
because other people create comparisons—Cavafy, Auden—but I personally
feel
tremendously attracted to her.
It is a very
simple thing. Hers is extremely tragic poetry, not only in subject
matter—this
is not big news, especially in the Russian realm—but in her language,
her
prosody. Her voice, her poetry, gives you almost the idea or sense that
the
tragedy is within the language itself. The reason I decided—it was
almost a
conscious decision not to compete with her—well, for one thing, I knew
I would
fail. After all, I’m a different person, a man what’s more, and it’s
almost
unseemly for a man to speak at the highest pitch of his voice, by which
I don’t
mean she was just a kind of romantic, raving . . . she was a very dark
poet.
INTERVIEWER
She can hold
more without breaking?
BRODSKY
Ya.
Akhmatova used to say about her: “Marina starts her poem on the upper
do, that
edge of the octave.” Well, it’s awfully hard to sustain a poem on the
highest
possible pitch. She’s capable of that. A human being has a very limited
capacity for discomfort or tragedy. Limited, technically speaking, like
a cow
that can’t produce more than two gallons of milk. You can’t squeeze
more
tragedy out of a man. So, in that respect, her reading of the human
drama, her
inconsolable voice, her poetic technique, are absolutely astonishing. I
think
nobody wrote better, in Russian, anyway. The tone with which she was
speaking,
that kind of tragic vibrato, that tremolo.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have
to come to her gradually or did you discover her overnight?
BRODSKY
No, it was
from the very threshold. I was given her poems by a friend of mine.
That was
it.
INTERVIEWER
In your own
poems the speaking voice is so terribly solitary, without benefit of a
single
human interaction.
BRODSKY
Ya, that’s what it is. Akhmatova
said this about the first batch of poems I brought her in 1962. That’s
exactly
what she said, verbatim. I presume that’s the characteristic of it.
INTERVIEWER
As poems
emerge are you conscious of the extent to which—for someone looking at
them
from the outside—they have a discernible line of development and
movement?
BRODSKY
No—the only
thing I’m conscious of is that I’m trying to make them different from
the
previous stuff I’ve written. Because one reacts not only to what he’s
read, but
what he wrote as well, ya? So every preceding thing is the point of
departure.
There should be a small surprise that there is some kind of detectable
linear
development.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to
write about places that don’t appear to be the places where you’ve
spent most
of your time. Has there been anything on New York, or Venice?
BRODSKY
I don’t
think I’ve written anything about New York. You can’t do much about New
York.
Whereas Venice—I’ve done quite a lot. But places like New England or
Mexico, or
England, old England—basically when you find yourself in a strange
place, and
the stranger the place it is, to a certain extent, the better—it
somehow
sharpens your notion of your individuality, say a place like Brighton
(laughs)
or York in England. You see yourself better against a strange
background. It’s
to be living outside your own context, like being in exile. One of the
advantages is that you shed lots of illusions. Not illusions about the
world,
but illusions about yourself. You kind of winnow yourself. I never had
as clear
a notion of what I am than I acquired when I came to the States—the
solitary
situation. I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You
realize
what you are . . . not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
Nietzsche
put it in so many words: “A man who’s left by himself is left with his
own
pig.”
INTERVIEWER
I’ll pay you
the compliment of saying my immediate sensation of any place you’ve
described
in a poem is to never want to go there.
BRODSKY
Terrific!
(laughs) If you put it in writing I’ll never be hired for an
advertising job.
INTERVIEWER
Is it
deliberate that you’ve waited so long between books?
BRODSKY
Not really.
I’m not very professional as a writer. I’m not really interested in
book after
book. There’s something ignoble about it, ya?
INTERVIEWER
Does your
family in the USSR have any sense of what you’re doing?
BRODSKY
They have
the basic idea, that I’m teaching and that I’m, if not financially,
somehow
psychologically, well off. They appreciate that I’m a poet. They didn’t
like it
at the very beginning. For a good fifteen years they hated every bit of
it, ya?
(laughs)—but then why shouldn’t they have? I don’t think I’m so excited
about
it myself. Akhmatova told me that when her father learned that she was
about to
publish a book, he said, “Well, do please one thing. Please take care
to not
malign my name. If you’re going to be in this business, please assume a
pen
name.”
Personally,
I’d much prefer to fly small planes, to be a bush pilot somewhere in
Africa,
than do this.
INTERVIEWER
How do you
feel about writing prose?
BRODSKY
I love it,
in English. To me it’s a challenge.
INTERVIEWER
Is it sweat?
BRODSKY
I don’t
regard it as sweat. It’s certainly labor. Yet it’s almost a labor of
love. If
asked to write prose in Russian I wouldn’t be so keen. But in English
it’s a
tremendous satisfaction. As I write I think about Auden, what he would
say—would he find it rubbish, or kind of entertaining?
INTERVIEWER
Is he your
invisible reader?
BRODSKY
Auden and
Orwell.
INTERVIEWER
Have you
ever tried writing fiction in any form?
BRODSKY
No. Well,
when I was young, I tried to write a novel. I wrote what I considered
one of
the breakthroughs in modern Russian writing . . . I’m awfully glad I
never saw
it again.
INTERVIEWER
Does
anything shock or surprise you? How do you face the world when you get
up—with
what idea in mind? “Here we go again,” or what?
BRODSKY
It certainly
doesn’t surprise me. I think the world is capable of only one thing
basically—proliferating its evils. That’s what time seems to be for.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t
have a corresponding idea that at some point people will advance a
quantum leap
in consciousness?
BRODSKY
A quantum
leap in consciousness is something I rule out.
INTERVIEWER
Just
deterioration—is that the picture?
BRODSKY
Well,
dilapidation rather than deterioration. Well, not exactly dilapidation.
If we
look at things in a linear fashion, it certainly doesn’t look any good,
ya? The
only thing that surprises me is the frequency, under the present
circumstances,
of instances of human decency, of sophistication, if you will. Because
basically the situation—on the whole—is extremely uncongenial for being
decent
or right.
INTERVIEWER
Are you,
finally, a thoroughly godless man? It seems contradictory. In some of
your
poetry I sense an opening.
BRODSKY
I don’t
believe in the infinite ability of the reason, or the rational. I
believe in it
only insofar as it takes me to the irrational—and this is what I need
it for,
to take me as far as I can get toward the irrational. There it abandons
you.
For a little while it creates a state of panic. But this is where the
revelations are dwelling—not that you may fish them out. But at least I
have
been given two or three revelations, or at least they have landed on
the edge
of reason and left their mark.
This all has
very little to do with any ordered religious enterprise. On the whole,
I’d
rather not resort to any formal religious rite or service. If I have
any notion
of a supreme being I invest it with absolutely arbitrary will. I’m a
little bit
opposed to that kind of grocery-store psychology which underlies
Christianity.
You do this and you’ll get that, ya? Or even better still: that God has
infinite mercy. Well, it’s basically anthropomorphism. I would go for
the Old
Testament God who punishes you—
INTERVIEWER
Irrationally—
BRODSKY
No,
arbitrarily. Even more I would go for the Zoroastrian version of deity,
which
is perhaps the cruelest possible. I kind of like it better when we are
dealing
with arbitrariness. In that respect I think I’m more of a Jew than any
Jew in
Israel. Merely because I believe, if I believe in anything, in the
arbitrary
God.
INTERVIEWER
I suspect
you’ve probably meditated a great deal about Eliot and Auden, the way
they made
these . . .
BRODSKY
Flings . . .
INTERVIEWER
Well, flings
or final decisions.
BRODSKY
Yes, I
certainly did. I must say I stand by Auden’s more readily than Eliot’s.
Although it would take somebody much smarter than I am to explain the
distinction between the two.
INTERVIEWER
From all the
pictures you get, though, Eliot in his last days was a wonderfully
happy man,
whereas Auden . . .
BRODSKY
Certainly he
wasn’t. I don’t know. It denotes a lot of things. Basically, to arrange
your
life in such a way that you arrive at a happy conclusion is—well,
perhaps I’m
too romantic, or too young to respect this kind of thing, or take it
seriously.
Again, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have had the structure laid out for
me in
childhood, as was the case with the both of them. So I’ve been doing
the whole
thing essentially on my own. For instance, I read the Bible for the
first time
when I was twenty-three. It leaves me somewhat shepherdless, you see. I
wouldn’t really know what to return to. I don’t have any notion of
paradise. I
don’t have one that I derived from childhood which, first of all, is
the
happiest time, and is also the first time you hear about paradise. I
went
through the severe, antireligious schooling in Russia which doesn’t
leave any
kind of notion about afterlife. So, what I’m trying to say, what
interests me
is the degree—the graspable degree of arbitrariness.
INTERVIEWER
What are
your highest moments then—when you are working in the depths of
language?
BRODSKY
This is what
we begin with. Because if there is any deity to me, it’s language.
INTERVIEWER
Are there
moments when you are writing when you are almost an onlooker?
BRODSKY
It’s awfully
hard for me to answer. During the process of writing—I think these are
the
better hours—of deepening, of furthering the thing. You’re kind of
entitled to
things you didn’t know were out there. That’s what language brings you
to,
perhaps.
INTERVIEWER
What’s that
Karl Kraus line: “Language is the divining rod that discovers wells of
thought”?
BRODSKY
It’s an
incredible accelerator of the cognitive process. This is why I cherish
it. It’s
kind of funny, because I feel in talking about language I sound like a
bloody
French structuralist. Since you mention Karl Kraus at least it gives it
kind of
a continental thing to reckon with. Well, they have culture, we have
guts, we
Russians and Americans.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me
about your love affair with Venice.
BRODSKY
In many ways
it resembles my hometown, St. Petersburg. But the main thing is that
the place
is so beautiful that you can live there without being in love. It’s so
beautiful that you know that nothing in your life you can come up with
or produce—especially
in terms of pure existence—would have a corresponding beauty. It’s so
superior.
If I had to live a different incarnation, I’d rather live in Venice as
a cat,
or anything, but in Venice. Or even as a rat. By 1970 I had an idée
fixe to get
to Venice. I even had an idea of moving there and renting a ground
floor in
some palazzo on the water, and sit there and write, and drop my
cigarette butts
so they would hiss in the water. And when the money would be through,
finished,
I would go to the store and buy a Saturday special with what was left
and blow
my mind [puts his finger to temple and gestures].
So, the
first thing I did when I became free to travel, that is, in 1972, after
teaching a semester in Ann Arbor, I got a round-trip ticket for Venice
and went
there for Christmas. It is interesting to watch the tourists who arrive
there.
The beauty is such that they get somewhat dumbfounded. What they do
initially
is to hit the stores to dress themselves—Venice has the best boutiques
in
Europe—but when they emerge with all those things on, still there is an
unbearable incongruity between the people, the crowd, and what’s
around.
Because no matter how well they’re dressed and how well they’re endowed
by
nature, they lack the dignity, which is partially the dignity of decay,
of that
artifice around them. It makes you realize that what people can make
with their
hands is a lot better than they are themselves.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have
a sense when you’re there of history winding down? Is that part of the
ambience?
BRODSKY
Yes, more or
less. What I like about it apart from the beauty is the decay. It’s the
beauty
in decay. It’s not going to be repeated, ever. As Dante said: “One of
the
primary traits of any work of art is that it is impossible to repeat.”
INTERVIEWER
What do you
think of Anthony Hecht’s Venetian Vespers?
BRODSKY
It’s an
awfully good book. It’s not so much about Venice—it’s about the
American
sensibility. I think Hecht is a superb poet. I think there are three of
them in
America, Wilbur, Hecht, and—I don’t really know how to allocate that
third
palm.
INTERVIEWER
I’m
interested to know why you put Wilbur up as high as you do.
BRODSKY
I like
perfection. It’s true that you don’t hear the throbbings of the
spheres, or
whatever. However, the magnificence with which he uses the material
compensates. Because—there is poetry and poetry. There are poets and
poets. And
Dick performs his function better than anyone else.
I think that
if I were born here I would end up with qualities similar to Hecht’s.
One thing
I would like to be is as perfect as Hecht and Wilbur are. There should
be
something else, I presume, of my own, but insofar as the craftsmanship
is
concerned one couldn’t wish for more.
INTERVIEWER
Is the
communication between kindred spirits pretty close? Do you watch each
other
carefully? Walcott, Milosz, Herbert, yourself—poets sharing a certain
terrain?
BRODSKY
Not exactly
that I watch Derek, but, for instance, I got two poems of his quite
recently,
scheduled to appear in The New Yorker—an editor sent me the Xeroxes—and
I
thought, “Well, Joseph—.” I thought, “This is something to reckon with
the next
time you write a poem.” (laughs)
INTERVIEWER
Who else is
there to reckon with?
BRODSKY
Oh, there
are lots of shadows and lots of real people. Eugenio Montale would be
one of
the living ones. There is a German, a very good German, Peter Huchel.
Nobody in
France, to my knowledge. I don’t really take that poetry seriously.
Akhmatova
has remarked, very wisely, that in the twentieth century, French
painting
swallowed French poetry. As for England, I’m certainly a great fan of
Philip
Larkin. I like him very much. The only complaint is the usual one—that
Larkin
writes so little. Also, Douglas Dunn—and there is a magnificent man in
Australia, Les Murray.
INTERVIEWER
What do you
read?
BRODSKY
Some books
on disciplines with which I wasn’t well acquainted, like Orientalism.
Encyclopedias. I almost don’t have time for such things. Please don’t
detect snobbery
in this; it’s merely a very grand fatigue.
INTERVIEWER
And what do
you teach? Does that affect your reading?
BRODSKY
Only insofar
as I have to read the poem before the class does (laughs). I’m teaching
Hardy
and Auden and Cavafy—those three: it rather reflects my tastes and
attachments.
And Mandelstam, a bit of Pasternak.
INTERVIEWER
Are you
aware that you are on a required reading list at Boston University for
a course
entitled “Modern Jewish Writing”?
BRODSKY
Well,
congratulations to Boston University! Very good. I don’t really know.
I’m a
very bad Jew. I used to be reproached by Jewish circles for not
supporting the
cause, the Jewish cause, and for having a great deal of the New
Testament
themes in my writing. Which I find absolutely silly. It’s nothing to do
with
the cultural heritage. It’s merely on my part the effect paying homage
to its
cause. It’s as simple as that.
INTERVIEWER
You are also
listed in a book called Famous Jews—
BRODSKY
Boy! Oh,
boy! Well, Famous Jews—so I’m a famous Jew—that’s how I’m going to
regard
myself from now on—
INTERVIEWER
What about
some of the people you most admire? We’ve touched on some of the ones
who have
died. How about the living, people whose existence is important to you,
if only
to know they are there.
BRODSKY
Dick Wilbur,
Tony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand. Those are just a few whom I
know
personally, and I’m extremely lucky in that sense. Montale, as I
mentioned,
would certainly be one; Walcott is another. And there are other people
I like
very much personally, and as writers. Susan Sontag, for instance. She
is the
best mind there is. That is on both sides of the Atlantic. Because, for
her,
the argument starts precisely where it ends for everyone else. I can’t
think of
anything in modern literature that can parallel the mental music of her
essays.
Somehow, I can’t separate people and writing. It just hasn’t happened
as yet
that I like the writing and not the person. I would say that even if I
know a
person is dreadful I would be the first to find justifications for that
dreadfulness if the writing is good. After all, it is hard to master
both life
and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had
better
be life.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me what
it was like to meet Lowell for the first time.
BRODSKY
I’d met
Lowell in 1972 at the Poetry International. He simply volunteered to
read my
poems in English as I read them in Russian, an extremely kind and
moving
gesture. So we both went onstage.
He invited
me to come to Kent. I was somewhat perplexed—my English wasn’t good
enough.
Also, I was somewhat worried about the railroad system in England—I
couldn’t
make heads nor tails out of it. And the third, perhaps the primary
reason why I
didn’t go, was that I thought it would be an imposition. Because, well,
who the
hell am I? And so, I just didn’t do it.
Then in 1975
I was in the Five Colleges in Massachusetts, living in Northampton, and
he
called and invited me to come to Brookline. By that time my English was
somewhat better and I went. The time we spent was in many ways the best
time I
can recall having while here in the States. We talked about this and
that, and
finally we settled on Dante. It was the first conversation about Dante
since
Russia which really made sense to me. He knew Dante inside out, I
think, in an
absolutely obsessive way. He was especially good on Inferno. I think he
had
lived for a while in Florence, or stayed there, so he felt more about
Inferno
than the other parts; at least the conversation revolved around those
things.
We spent
about five or six hours, more, and then we went for dinner. He said
some very
pleasant things to me. The only thing casting a shadow was that I knew
that
during Auden’s last years they had had a row, kind of a lasting row.
Wystan
didn’t like Lowell’s extramoral situation, whereas Lowell was thinking
that it
was none of his business and was quite caustic about him as a poet.
INTERVIEWER
That doesn’t
sound like something Auden would worry about very much—
BRODSKY
In the sense
that Wystan was a proper son of England, he would mind someone else’s
morality.
I remember a remark he made. I asked him “What do you think of Lowell?”
It was
on the first day I saw Wystan. I sat down and started to grill him in
my
absolutely mindless way. He said something like, “I don’t like men who
leave a
smoking tail of weeping women behind them.” Or maybe it was the other
way
around: “A weeping tail of smoking women”—
INTERVIEWER
Either way—
BRODSKY
Ya, either
way. He didn’t criticize Lowell as a poet. It was simply kind of a
commonplace
morality at which I think he, Auden, enjoyed playing.
INTERVIEWER
But it was
Auden, after all, who would have God pardoning various people for
writing well—
BRODSKY
Ya, but he
said that in 1939. I think, in a sense, that the reason behind all of
this was
that he insisted on faithfulness—in his own affairs as well as in a
broader
sense. Besides, he tended to become less flexible. When you live long
you see
that little things end up in big damages. Therefore, you get more
personalized
in your attitudes. Again, I also think it was kind of a game with him.
He
wanted to play schoolmaster and for that, in this world, he was fully
qualified.
INTERVIEWER
If you could
get either or both of them back, what kinds of things do you think
you’d talk
about now?
BRODSKY
Lots of
things. In the first place—well, it’s an odd question—perhaps about the
arbitrariness of God. Well, that conversation wouldn’t go far with
Auden,
merely because I don’t think he’d like to talk about that heavy Thomas
Mannish
stuff. And yet, he became a kind of formal churchgoer, so to speak. I’m
somewhat worried about that—because the poetic notion of infinity is
far
greater than that which is sponsored by any creed—and I wonder about
the way he
would reconcile that. I’d like to ask him whether he believes in the
church, or
simply the creed’s notion of infinity, or paradise, or church
doctrine—which
are normally points of one’s spiritual arrival. For the poet they are
springboards, or points of departure for metaphysical journeys. Well,
things
like that. But mostly I would like to find out certain things about the
poems,
what he meant here and there. Whether, for instance, in “In Praise of
Limestone”
he really lists the temptations, or kind of translates the temptations
as they
are found in the Holy Book, or if they simply came out like a poem, ya?
[Long
pause.] I wish he were here. More than anyone else. Well, that’s kind
of a
cruel thing to say, but—I wish three or four people were alive to talk
to. Him,
Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam—which already makes four. Thomas
Hardy.
INTERVIEWER
Is there
anyone you’d want to pull out from the ages?
BRODSKY
Oh, that
would be a big crowd. This room wouldn’t hold them.
INTERVIEWER
How did
Lowell feel with respect to religion, finally?
BRODSKY
We never
talked about it, except ironically, mentioning it en passant. He was
absolutely
astonishing talking about politics, or writers’ weaknesses. Or human
weaknesses. He was extremely generous, but what I liked in him was the
viciousness of tongue. Both Lowell and Auden were monologuists. In a
sense, you
shouldn’t talk to people like them, you should listen to them—which is
kind of
an ultimate existential equivalent for reading poetry. It’s a kind of
spinoff.
And I was all ears, partly because of my English.
He was a
lovely man, really lovely—Lowell, that is. The age difference wasn’t
that big
between us—well, some twenty years, so I felt in a sense somewhat more
comfortable with him than with Auden. But then again, I felt most
comfortable
with Akhmatova.
INTERVIEWER
Did either
one of them interrogate you in the way you wanted to be interrogated
about
yourself and your writing?
BRODSKY
Lowell did.
Akhmatova asked me several questions . . . But while they were alive,
you see,
I felt as a young boy. They were the elders, so to speak, the masters.
Now that
they are gone I think of myself as terribly old all of a sudden. And .
. . this
is what civilization means, carrying on. Well, I don’t think Auden
would like
rock music, nor do I. Nor Lowell, I think.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have
any close friends who are artists, painters, musicians, composers?
BRODSKY
Here I
don’t. In Russia I had. Here the only person close to that is
Baryshnikov.
Composers, none at all. No, it’s empty. The category of people I used
to like
most of all were graphic artists and musicians.
INTERVIEWER
But you draw
a lot of sustenance from those realms.
BRODSKY
From music,
yes. I don’t really know how it is reflected in what I’m doing, but I
certainly
do.
INTERVIEWER
What do you
listen to? I notice that Billie Holiday is on the turntable now—
BRODSKY
Billie
Holiday’s “Sophisticated Lady” is a magnificent piece. I like Haydn.
Music is
actually the best teacher of composition, I think, even for literature.
If only
because—well, the principle, for instance, of the concerto grosso:
three parts,
one quick, two slow, or vice versa. You know that you have to pour
whatever you
have into this twenty-minute thing. Also, what can follow in music: the
alternation of lyricism with mindless pizzicato, et cetera . . .
they’re like
the shifts, counterpoints, the fluid character of an argument, a fluid
montage.
When I first began to listen to classical music, the thing that haunted
me was
the way it moves, the unpredictability. So in that sense Haydn is
terrific
stuff because he’s so absolutely unpredictable. [Long pause.] It’s so
silly . .
. I think how meaningless everything is, except for two or three
things—writing
itself, listening to music, perhaps a little bit of thinking. But the
rest—
INTERVIEWER
How about
friendship?
BRODSKY
Friendship
is a nice thing. I’d include food then (laughs) . . . But other things
that
you’re forced to do—paying taxes, counting the numbers, writing
references,
doing your chores—don’t all those things strike you as utterly
meaningless?
It’s like when we sat in that café. The girl was doing something with
the pies,
or whatever—they were in that refrigerator with the glass. And she
stuck her
head in and she was doing all those things, the rest of her out of the
refrigerator. She was in that position for about two minutes. And once
you see
it there’s no point in existing anymore. (laughs) Simple point, ya?
INTERVIEWER
Except that
the minute you translate that into an image or a thought you’ve already
taken
it out of uselessness.
BRODSKY
But once
you’ve seen it the whole of existence is compromised.
INTERVIEWER
It’s coming
back to time again—here because you’re seeing the container with
nothing in it.
BRODSKY
More or
less, ya. Actually I read in the front of Penn Warren’s recent book
(gets up
and rummages at his desk): “Time is the dimension in which God strives
to
define his own being.” Well, “strives” is a little bit kindergartenish.
But
there is another quote, this one from the encyclopedia: “There is, in
short, no
absolute time standard.”
INTERVIEWER
The last
time I talked with you two things hadn’t happened. How much of your
time is
filled with being preoccupied with Afghanistan and the hostage
situation?
BRODSKY
When I’m not
writing or reading, I’m thinking about both. Of the two I think the
Afghan
situation is the most—tragic. When I saw the first footage from
Afghanistan on
the TV screen a year ago, it was very short. It was tanks rolling on
the
plateau. For thirty-two hours nonstop I was climbing the walls. Well,
it’s not
that I’m ashamed of being Russian. I have felt that already twice in my
life:
in 1956 because of Hungary and in 1968 because of Czechoslovakia. In
those days
my attitude was aggravated by immediate fear, for my friends if not for
myself—merely because I knew that whenever the international situation
worsens,
it’s automatically followed by the internal crackdown.
But this is
not what really blew my mind in Afghanistan. What I saw was basically a
violation of the elements—because that plateau never saw a plough
before, let
alone a tank. So, it was a kind of existential nightmare. And it still
sits on
my retina. Since then I have been thinking about soldiers who are,
well, about
twenty years younger than me, so that some of them could be,
technically
speaking, my children. I even wrote a poem that said “glory to those
that in
the Sixties went marching into the abortion clinics, thereby saving the
Motherland the disgrace.”
What drives
me absolutely wild is not the pollution—it’s something much more
dreadful. It’s
something I think when they’re breaking ground to the foundation of a
building.
It’s usurpation of land, violation of the elements. It’s not that I am
of a
pastoral bent. No, I think, on the contrary, the nuclear power stations
should
be there—it’s cheaper than oil, in the end.
But a tank
rolling onto the plateau demeans space. This is absolutely meaningless,
like
subtracting from zero. And it is vile in a primordial sense, partly
because of
tanks’ resemblance to dinosaurs. It simply shouldn’t be.
INTERVIEWER
Are your
feelings about these things very separate from what you write?
BRODSKY
I don’t
believe in writing it—I believe in action. I think it’s time to create
some
sort of International Brigade. It was done in 1936, why not now? Except
that in
1936 the International Brigade was financed by the GPU—that is, Soviet
State
Security. I just wonder if there’s anybody with the money . . .
somebody in
Texas who could financially back the thing.
INTERVIEWER
What would
you imagine the International Brigade doing?
BRODSKY
Well, the
International Brigade can do essentially what it did in 1936 in Spain,
that is,
fight back, help the locals. Or at least give some sort of medical
assistance—food, shelter. If there is a noble cause, it is this—not
some
Amnesty International . . . I wouldn’t mind driving a Red Cross jeep .
. .
INTERVIEWER
It’s hard to
identify clear moral sides sometimes—
BRODSKY
I don’t
really know what kind of moral sides you are looking for, especially in
a place
like Afghanistan. It’s quite obvious. They’ve been invaded; they’ve
been
subjugated. They may be just backward tribesmen but slavery isn’t my
idea of
revolution either.
INTERVIEWER
I’m talking
more in terms of countries.
BRODSKY
Russia
versus the U.S.? I don’t think there is any question. If there were no
other
distinction between those two, it would be enough for me to have the
system of
a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for
preferring the
U.S. to the Soviet Union. Or, to make it less complicated—because even
that
perplexes most people—I would prefer the country you can leave to the
country
you cannot.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said
that you are fairly satisfied with your Lowell poem which you wrote in
English.
Is there any reason why you didn’t just continue writing in English?
BRODSKY
There are
several reasons. In the first place, I have enough to do in Russian.
And in
English you have lots of terrific people alive. There is no point in my
doing
that. I wrote an elegy in English simply because I wanted to please the
shadow.
And when I finished Lowell, I had another poem coming in English. There
were
wonderful rhymes coming my way, and yet I told myself to stop. Because
I don’t
want to create for myself an extra reality. Also, I would have to
compete with
the people for whom English is the mother tongue, ya? And, lastly,
which is the
most important, I don’t have that aspiration. I’m pleased enough with
what I’m
doing in Russian, which sometimes goes and sometimes doesn’t. When it
doesn’t,
I can’t think of trying it in English. I don’t want to be penalized
twice
(laughs). And, as for English, I write my essays, which gives me enough
sense
of confidence. The thing is—I don’t really know how to put
it—technically
speaking, English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life.
It’s
not an exaggeration and not a brooding statement. That’s what it is, ya?
INTERVIEWER
Did you read
Updike’s piece on Kundera in The New York Times Book Review? He
finished by
referring to you, citing you as one who has dealt with exile by
becoming an
American poet—
BRODSKY
That’s
flattering, but that’s rubbish.
INTERVIEWER
I imagine
that he was referring not only to the fact that you have written a few
things
in English, but also to the fact that you were beginning to deal with
American
landscapes, Cape Cod—
BRODSKY
Could be—in
that case, what can I say? Certainly one becomes the land one lives in,
especially at the end. In that sense I’m quite American.
INTERVIEWER
How do you
feel about writing something full of American associations in the
Russian
language?
BRODSKY
In many
cases you don’t have the Russian word for that, or you have a Russian
word
which is kind of cumbersome; then you look for ways around the problem.
INTERVIEWER
Well, you’re
writing about squad cars and Ray Charles’s jazz—
BRODSKY
Ya, that you
can do—because Ray Charles is a name, and “squad car” has an expression
in
Russian, and so does the hoop on the basketball pole. But the most
difficult
thing I had to deal with in that poem had to do with Coca-Cola, to
convey the
sensation that it reminded me of Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, that line
Belshazzar sees on the wall that foretold the end of his kingdom.
That’s where
the expression “writing on the wall” comes from. You can’t say
“Coca-Cola sign”
because there’s no idiom for that. So, I had to describe it in a rather
roundabout way—because of which the image rather profited. I said not
“a sign,”
but something to the effect of the cuneiform or the hieroglyphics of
Coca-Cola,
ya? So that it reinforced the image of “the writing on the wall.”
INTERVIEWER
What do you
think happens psychically when you’ve brought the poem to a sort of
dead point,
to get beyond which you would have to go in a direction that you can’t
yet
imagine?
BRODSKY
The thing is
that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending.
For the
poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the
contrary,
the point of departure for the metaphysical journey. For instance, you
write a
poem about the crucifixion. You have decided to go ten stanzas—and yet
it’s the
third stanza and you’ve already dealt with the crucifixion. You have to
go
beyond that and add something—to develop it into something which is not
there
yet. Basically what I’m saying is that the poetic notion of infinity is
far
greater, and it’s almost self-propelled by the form. Once in a
conversation
with Tony Hecht at Breadloaf we were talking about the usage of the
Bible, and
he said, “Joseph, wouldn’t you agree that what a poet does is to try to
make
more sense out of these things?” And that’s what it is—there’s more
sense, ya?
In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not
talking
to people anymore, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing
is simply
talking back to the language itself—as beauty, sensuality, wisdom,
irony—those
aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not
an art
or a branch of art, it’s something more. If what distinguishes us from
other
species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic
operation, is
our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as
an
entertainment, as a “read,” commits an anthropological crime, in the
first
place, against himself.
* Crosses is
a prison in Leningrad.
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