Posts Tagged ‘“joseph brodsky”’

Brodsky to Derieva: “You are a great poet.”

Alexander Deriev  reminds me, “Today would have been the 72nd birthday of Regina Derieva. Сегодня Регине Дериевой исполнилось бы 72 года.” The Russian poet Regina Derieva, who died in 2013, would have been 72.  We’ve written about her death here, and her life and work here and here and here. Her papers are now held at Stanford Libraries. I wrote about her for the Times Literary Supplement here.

“You, Regina, are indeed this case – a great poet. …The real authorship belongs here to poetry itself, to freedom itself. For a long time, I have not seen anything on a par with your poetry either among our fellow countrymen or among the English-speaking poets. And I can guess more or less – I can hear – what it cost you to reach this point, the point over the life and over yourself. This is why the joy of reading your poetry is also heartbreaking. In this poem, you exist in the plane where no one else exists, where no one else can help:  there are no kin and, a fortiori, there are no equal to you.”

The occasion of her birthday reminds me that I haven’t written about her new book, Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose, out with Marick Press a few months ago. Now is the perfect occasion for its Book Haven debut.

Many poets seem to have suffered a primal deprivation, for Derieva, it was her birthplace Odessa. As she writes in Quarter to Paradise (trans. Alex Cigale): “At so early an age, I was deprived of everything, all at once: the sea, the fruit gardens, the chestnuts and acacias, the alleyways and streets of Odessa. And I found myself in the Kazakh steppe. The wind there was always marauding, never allowing for a cultural layer to form on the barren spot. There was neither spring nor fall: with the end of the infernal winter began an infernal summer. It is not incidental that Stalin chose precisely this part of the country for his prison camps, where a human being had no time to live, thinking only of how best to survive … there, where fate offers to place its period.”

I haven’t had a chance to explore the volume fully, but so far her American poems are among my favorites, written during a brief sojourn in the States.

Below, two of them, translated by Alan Shaw:

WORCESTER, MA

A bird is crying out at dawn,
and at dusk grows still again:
“Little enough under the sun
have I and all my siblings seen.

“Golden sky at break of day,
growing azure towards the dark.
The voice is lost, which is to say,
time is emptiness’s mark.”

The voice fades out, just as if all
hint of bird were gone there too,
besides the readiness of a soul
to lose itself in heaven’s blue.

EAST NORWALK, CT

The hawk goes corkscrewing into the sky,
drawing with hard quill in three dimensions
on three-ply eternal paper his cry,
his whisper, a faithfulness that’s endless.

I see the whole thing, as the neighborhood darkens
and players come in from the playing field –
He cradles the ball like the nape of a girlfriend,
being so strong, and new, and thrilled

with this amorous ruckus, this game, this spat,
this trial and torture of wings, his calling.
The hawk drops down, having built his estate;
a heavy drop of sweat is falling.

Come then, since I have put lips into play,
search out and storm me, unleash a rushing
rain of heavy rough feathers; away,
you stoic of in- and exhalation,

historian of air, soul-striking lightning,
come, take me and lift me far out of sight
of the awful chance that an oath will be broken,
the secret be known of what madness can write.

(From Alexander Deriev on the photo above: “This photo of Regina was taken at the Karaganda TV studio sometime in the early 1970s. This was the only telecast of a series of poetic TV programs that Regina ever agreed to do. The program was devoted to Nikolay Zabolotsky who was forced to spend several years in Karaganda. The broadcast took place, but then the TV editor decided to claim authorship of the program and did not pay a dime to Regina. After this, Regina staunchly refused to participate in any TV projects.”)

A Christmas card from the Brodsky Foundation features “Anno Domini” and Martin Schongauer.

My favorite Christmas card this year has a poem on it. The Joseph Brodsky Foundation usually doesn’t disappoint – not even in the year of COVID, which has put a damper on the season, as well as on its Christmas cards. This year’s greeting features Martin Schongauer‘s 1475 engraving and the Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky‘s 1968 poem, “Anno Domini,” in the Russian. Can’t read Russian? You can read Daniel Weissbort‘s translation of the poem in The Iowa Review here. Or you could buy a copy of Brodsky’s Nativity Poems, a superb collection of eighteen of the poems he wrote annually, as a sort of birthday greeting. The collection is translated by a number of first-rate translators, including Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.

The Russian poet said the annual discipline pretty much began when he began to write poems seriously. He tried to write a poem for every Christmas – even though the Jewish poet called himself an atheist. “I liked that concentration of everything in one place – which is what you have in that cave scene,” he explained. But that’s not all of it, either. He once facetiously described himself “a Christian by correspondence.” I suspect he was only half joking.

Why did he do it? Here’s the way  himself explained it in an interview with Peter Vail, included in the book:

I’ll tell you how it all started. I wrote the first Nativity poems, I think, in Komarovo. I was living at a dacha, I don’t remember whose, though it might have been Academician [Aksel] Berg’s. And there I cut a picture out of a Polish magazine, I think it was Przekrój. The picture was Adoration of the Magi, I don’t remember by whom. I stuck it on the ceramic stove and often looked at it in the evenings. It burned later on, the painting, and the stove, and the dacha itself. But at the time I kept on looking and decided to write a poem on the same subject. That is, it all began not from religious feelings, or from Pasternak or Eliot, but from a painting.

His fellow Nobelist, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, gave me his own explanation twenty years ago: “If we cannot return to the stable world of the past, at least we can have some respect for some stable points. Brodsky would write every Christmas a poem – on that event, on the birth of Jesus.  This is a sort of piety, I should say, for the past, for some crucial points in our history.”

“Anno Domino” returned me to Nativity Poems tonight, on Christmas Eve. As I recall, I return to this volume every Christmas … my own “stable point.” From Richard Wilbur’s translation of 25.XII.1993:

… For miracles, gravitating
to earth, know just where people will be waiting,
and eagerly will find the right address
and tenant, even in a wilderness.

Novelist John le Carré, a.k.a. David Cornwell, at the German Embassy, 2017

Author John le Carré died of pneumonia last night in Cornwall at age 89. The former Cold War intelligence agent wrote Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which has been called the greatest spy novel ever written (as well as a shelf of other books). I loved it for sentences like these:

“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”

“Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no future: there was only a continued slide into the still more terrifying versions of the present.”

“Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”

Although the news is only a few hours old, lots of obituaries are up already – the Guardian’s is here. I didn’t know him, and never read a novel besides the first. But one of the things I remember him most for is that he was at a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead with Joseph Brodsky when the Russian poet won the Nobel in 1987. He said of his friend: “My enthusiasm for him and my admiration for him were of course in the first instance not so much  poetical but political. I loved the cuts, the courage that he displayed in 1964” – that is, during his Leningrad show trial.

Sentenced to internal exile near the Arctic Circle, 1964

Here are his memories of that event, as told to Valentina Polukhina, in her Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries:

Yes. I was with him at that moment. I took him to the Chinese restaurant, which is gone now; I’ll show you where it was. It was a lousy little restaurant anyway, but it was quite good food and I used to go there. When I invited Joseph for lunch, he said ‘yes’, I think for two reasons: first, Rene Brendel [wife of the pianist Alfred Brendel] would not let him drink, not much, not as he liked to drink, and also of course he was killing time while he waited to hear the news. I had no idea of this. I actually didn’t know that the Nobel Prize winner was at that moment being selected … and then Rene Brendel appeared in the doorway. She is big, German, tall, lots of authority, still speaks with a slight German accent, and she said, ‘Joseph, you must come home.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ He had two or three large whiskies by then. And she said, ‘You have won the Prize.’ He said, ‘What prize?’ And she said, ‘You have won the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I said, ‘Waiter, a bottle of champagne’. She she sat down and accepted a glass of champagne, and I said to her then, ‘How do you know?’ She said, ‘The whole of Swedish television is waiting for Joseph outside the house’. I said, ‘Well, you know, there are three or four candidates; they may be outside every door. We need more than this before we can drink champagne in comfort’. Joseph’s publisher, Roger Straus, was in London, so Rene telephoned him at his hotel, and he confirmed that he had received official word from Stockholm that Joseph has got the prize. So, we drank the champagne. Joseph didn’t like champagne, but accepted it as a symbol. He wanted more whisky, but Rene said he must come home.  …

More … on the U.S.S.R.

Can you recognize a KGB man inside or outside Russia?

It was easy to recognize them in Russia in 1987, because those who were put alongside me had the veneer of Western manners and spoke unnaturally good English, and made fatal mistakes, like trying to talk like sophisticated Europeans. It’s very funny when somebody pretends that he knows whiskies or something like that. I don’t know whiskies, but I know this man doesn’t.

We seem never to be able to produce a realistic portrait of each other. Another fatal mistake that Western writers make in trying to depict a Soviet person.

And vice versa. I just wonder how Joseph saw the rest of his writing life, where it was going to take place. What was the grit in the oyster. Where would he get his aggravation from?

… If you didn’t know Joseph at all, what would you have made of him after reading the essay ‘A Collector’s Item’ [about British spy Kim Philby]? Is it written by a poet, a university professor, a philosopher or an amateur-psychologist? Are his analyses of the phenomenon correct, profound or superficial?

I was fascinated that Joseph got into the spying business, because it raises all the literary questions: who am I? To what am I responsible? Where do my loyalties lie? What is the true me? You are deliberately contrasting behavior with emotion. You may detest being in my company but I would never know, because the courtesy of our existence tells otherwise. You may be reporting me to the new KGB, I will never know. In a sense, the Russians knew more about psychology before Freud than ever since.

Because it was a matter of survival.

Yes, it was a matter of survival and their literature was so perceptive. They have by instinct a greater understanding of human nature than can ever be given by a scientist. I think, Joseph probably knew more about me than any analyst would after 20 years.

… If Rainer Maria Rilke is right, that Russian is sharing a boundary with God, then Russians are paying the price for the privilege.

I met in Russia so many wonderful people. Every encounter in all four visits has been so electrical, so unpredictable. You just never know whether you are going to walk into a palace or a thief’s tent. I was shocked when I went in 1987 for the first time and took my own interpreter, which disconcerted everybody; then we went again in 1993 and I couldn’t believe that Estee Lauder had replaced GUM in Red Square. The capitalization of Russia is as disconcerting to me as it is for Russians. Money is utterly mysterious. It seems to be in all the wrong hands.

You also perhaps notice that the KGB and the Party knew where the money was and is.

Nobody else does.

“Nothing of this man’s thinking was held back…”

Peter Filkins has an excellent retrospective, “Words Preserved Against a Day of Fear,” on Russian Nobel Poet Joseph Brodsky, with plenty of anecdotes, in a recent edition of The American Scholar.  But then, I’m a fan of the genre. Filkins was a student at Columbia in the early 1980s. He describes a class this way:

There, in what can only be described as the Soviet glumness of Dodge Hall, Brodsky would hold forth for two hours each Tuesday. Hardy, Frost, Cavafy, and Auden were the main fare, as well as Wilfred Owen, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Brodsky was not the most elegant of classroom managers, to say the least. His method mainly consisted of asking a question for which he clearly had the answer, and then proceeding to quietly reply to any student response with either “Garbage” or “Pretty good.” (I once received a “Pretty good—in fact, that’s awfully good!” at which point it felt as if the heavens would burst into chorus.) Described this way, Brodsky’s method sounds like a nightmare, and I’m sure for some it was, but for many of us the performance was mesmerizing.

Not a “failed poet”… not a boxer, either.

From three to five P.M. on those darkening fall afternoons, we felt that we were not so much in the presence of a poet, and certainly not an academic or a scholar, as of poetry itself. Nothing of this man’s thinking was held back, and it seemed as if he were making his case for poetry to the spheres rather than to a roomful of graduate students. Yes, he could be rude, and no, none of us ever got our essays back with any kind of useful comments, if we got them back at all. And he could be wrongheaded (his case for reading Frost’s “Home Burial” as a tragic rendering of Pygmalion’s love for Galatea seemed a stretch) or even flat wrong (Brecht and Neruda are not second-rate poets—they were just Marxists; Nabokov is not a “failed poet,” just a fellow genius of a different stripe). But once you found your way past the manner, you got to the matter: a whole and almost molecular engagement with what poetry can be, why it matters, and why it is the very manna of thought and feeling when read seriously.

This kind of gravitas remains the central attraction of Brodsky’s verse. He pegged poetry as “the supreme form of human locution in any culture,” representing “not even a form of art, but our anthropological, genetic goal, our linguistic, evolutionary beacon” (from his essay “An Immodest Proposal”). Although these ideals might seem too lofty for the marginalized art of poetry to bear up under today, they were at the core of what he felt to be his charge as a teacher. Agree with him or not on any particular poet or poem, there was no ignoring what he handed over freely to his class, and what he cites elsewhere in the same essay, namely, that poetry “is the only insurance available against the vulgarity of the human heart.” Reading poetry, “you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours,” and the same could be said for his teaching.

Underlined

I’ve published the reading lists that Joseph B. gave people, and the one he gave me,  here. But Filkins got a different one. Here’s the story:

That same night after his aria on Frost, as we walked out of Dodge Hall, I had the audacity to ask if he might want to go for a drink. “Let’s try it!” he offered, and before I knew it, I was sitting at a table in a bar across the street, waiting for Brodsky to collect our drinks and wondering, what the hell am I going to say now? Wisely, I started with the only thing I could think of: “What should I read?”

Nodding his head in approval, he asked for pen and paper, and there in a little notebook I carried around he scribbled down a list: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Weldon Kees (underlined), Ovid, Horace, Virgil, Catullus, minor Alexandrian poets, Paul Celan, Peter Huchel, Georg Trakl (underlined), Antonio Machado, Umberto Saba, Eugenio Montale (underlined), Andrew Marvell, Ivor Gurney, Patrick Kavanagh, Douglas Dunne, Zbigniew Herbert (underlined), Vasco Popa, Vladimir Holan, Ingeborg Bachmann, “Gilgamesh,” Randall Jarrell, Vachel Lindsay, Theodore Roethke, Edgar Lee Masters, Howard Nemerov, Max Jacob, Thomas Trahern, and then a short list of essayists: Hannah Arendt, William Hazlitt, George Orwell, Elias Canetti (underlined and Crowds and Power added), (Temptation to Exist added), and finally the poet Les Murray added in my own hand after he suggested it. The sheet of paper, roughly the size of an iPhone but, as Brodsky would say, with far more and far greater information stored within it, remains tucked away inside my copy of A Part of Speech to this day.

Read the whole thing here.

“If humanistic values ​​cease to be important to us, the future of the world is fragile.” Photo: Mariusz Kubik/Wikipedia

Czesław Miłosz called her “the grande dame of Polish poetry.” Celebrated journalist Ryszard Kapusciński called her “one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century.” Yet Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) is too little known in the United States, where she spent some years. (I’ve written about her before, here and here and here and more.)

It’s three years since she died. New York librarian and salonnière extraordinaire Izabela Barry remembers her by publishing a 2006 interview she did with the poet, which was published in Polish here. A few excerpts in English below:

Is it easier for a poet to translate other poets?

I am deeply convinced that poetry should not be translated by anyone except poets. This is a task for poets because only a poet can penetrate into the structure of a poem, enter its atmosphere, read the second intentions of the poem. The poet has richer access to the poem. I believe that the most successful translations are made by poets. Therefore, I boldly started translating poems, because I believed that I have a greater right to do so, and at the same time I stick to the principle of translating only poets that I like or love.  I’ve managed to continue this way until today, with the possible exception of when we were preparing an anthology of American poetry with my husband, Artur Międzyrzecki. That book was the result of several years of work and is almost entirely translated by us. In that case, it was necessary to translate many poets.

I have the impression that in your poetry you distance yourself from the political situation, you do not touch current events. It seems that since martial law, you have abandoned this sphere in favor of writing about events not directly related to our political lives.

Her 2008 book in English.

Not necessarily. Recently, a few of my poems have appeared in which I “deal with” great poets who turned out to be anti-Semites. Besides, I had some issues with that and called Miłosz, who said: “We need to expand the space of poetry.” These poems are included in my last volume of poetry, which is about great American and English poets who are not very famous in this respect. It amazes me, because I have always thought that great minds should be great in every way. Of course, I am very interested in the situation in Poland, I never run away from it. I maniacally read daily newspapers and know perfectly well what I don’t like, and mostly I don’t like what is happening at the moment. Poetry, on the other hand, is never a direct response to topicality. If I take part in the internal discourse that bothers the nation, I am looking for something that is really deep and important. And I hope that what is happening in Poland at the moment is temporary. But, of course, I can be wrong. You never know when you need to pull out your pen and stop being silent.

In your memoirs, you write a lot about Zbigniew Herbert, about your friendship with him. You probably noticed that there are many larger and small political groups in Poland that try to appropriate Herbert and make his work a banner for their own activities, which Herbert – it seems to me – would not necessarily have supported or accepted.

He was our great friend. We knew him back when he was a very charming young man. He was a frequent guest in our home. When we were in America, the Herberts had just come back and they lived in our house. There was even a very funny situation when television reporters came to interview Herbert, and he was talking with them in our apartment, sitting at our table, and our friends were surprised to recognize this interior. So you can see that our relationship was really close.

As for his views, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding, because Herbert was surrounded by people who should not have had access to him in difficult times. This happened when he was weak and sick, at a time when he tried to cut himself off from his former friends, declaring that they had political views that were too leftist. It was very sad for all of us. We never anticipated such a situation. In this, Herbert’s wife, Katarzyna Herbert, who brought a lot of order to these matters, was of great help. She gave an extensive interview to Jacek Żakowski in Gazeta Wyborcza and assessed the condition of Herbert and the people around him very fairly. She was very upset that his friends had been hurt by being in such a painful situation.

With Szymborska in 2011, Kraków

In an essay about Herbert, I wrote that the most terrible thing is that the “directives” in his poetry began to sicken me. It’s terrible to say that, because “The Message of Mr. Cogito” is a very beautiful poem, but I can’t really read it anymore, mainly because it is used so much by the right, and in the most extreme, very unpleasant way. I do not think that Herbert would be pleased that the contents of his poems were placed under every banner. This is the danger that awaits the poet: trivialization. This poem is difficult to listen to, because everyone recites it and everyone refers to it. Poetry is lost and the poet himself is lost. After all, poetry is an absolute reflection of personality, and certain interpretations work to its detriment.

There are many moments in your American poems that touch me personally as an immigrant. Yet you have never had the status of a full immigrant, someone who does not intend to return to his or her homeland.

Four years of absence from the country is a particular experience, naturally limited in some ways, and incomparable compared with the feeling of a man who does not intend or cannot return home. We left because of a difficult situation, but when our friends pressed us to come back, we did immediately and were very happy to do so. Our best work was created after we returned from America, because it took on new horizons, it became more rounded. America entered our consciousness, but also Poland through it.

My own 2011 interview with her in “World Literature Today”

I regret that my volume American Poems (2002) is relatively unknown. I don’t know why this is, because my other books have been much discussed, and this one has been left a bit aside. Perhaps I’m wrong, because during one of my last meetings at the PEN Club I read a few poems from it and the listeners bought out the stock immediately. American Poems amused them, because there is a lot of humor, light, greenery, the city, and at the same time a some healthy nostalgia. It describes people, Americans, who interested me immensely. This collection expresses all my affection for America.

A volume of your poems translated into English is being prepared here in America…

Yes, Bogdana and John Carpenter, who are translators, have already sent me the texts of a new book that will appear here, I hope. I have looked through the whole thing and I think that they are very good translations. Of course, the poet will always find something small, and the Carpenters were grateful to me for my comments. I believe that this is a great opportunity if the poet has the opportunity to check the language of the translation. Miłosz always co-translated his poetry, he had a very good eye and hearing, he always claimed that he was happy to be able to participate in the translation process. Virtually all of his poems published in English are translated under his supervision. Sometimes you can destroy a poem in translation and we won’t even know it.

And can poetry – I ask naively – save the world?

This is not a naive question. Miłosz talked about it in [his 1945 volume] Ocalenie. I, too, have tried to ask myself what poetry is worth if it cannot save anything. But … we don’t know whether or not it can. Joseph Brodsky believed that it could. He was so convinced that I could only admire his faith. After all, he saw, perhaps even more deeply than others, what was happening and what the modern world is like. He was not a naive man, he closely watched the present day, yet he believed that poetry had a great task ahead of it. He even said such things that if a nation does not read poetry, it is in danger of totalitarianism. These are very harsh words, and vague of course, but you’d have to dig into what it really means. And it means that if humanistic values ​​cease to be important to us, the future of the world is fragile.

Read the whole thing in Polish here.

On California Street, San Francisco (Photo by Grisha Freidin on https://thenoiseoftime.blogspot.com/2020/01/an-afternoon-with-joseph-brodsky-in-san.html?m=1

On May 24, Joseph Brodsky would have turned 80 years old. You know that. I wrote about it already, here. But someone else beat us all to it: Grisha Freidin, Stanford Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures emeritus, made his eightieth birthday post in January on his blog The Noise of Time. The month of death was momentarily confused with the month of birth. Perhaps this post will be the final word. He writes: