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First Meeting: My Unreliable Memory

Monday, 29 January, 1996

A BOOK of poetry, in Russian, by "Iosif Brodskii", entitled Ostanovka v pustyne [A Halt in the Wilderness]; publisher, the Chekhov  Press, New York, 1970. An inscription, in Russian, "Danielu Vaisbortu", followed by, in English, "i.e. From Russian with Love, London 29-11-72' '. Then the author's ballooning signature. The occasion: Poetry International, a British Arts Council-funded event. Locale: the huge Festival Hall, where Brodsky was to give a reading. He was fresh from Russia - from "Russian", as he would put it. He had come here with W H. Auden, travelling from Auden's home in Vienna, Brodsky's first "Halt in the Wilderness " of the West.
   
"From Russia with Love. "Joseph was boyishly tickled by this and used the formula quite often. Still, the irony, if one can call it that, is also rather melancholic, perhaps even nostalgic, although he was not nostalgic about the Soviet Union. As for the variant, "Russian" - if not simply a slip of the pen, it was perhaps attributable to my being a translator. The inscription, in that case, turned out to be apposite, since poetry translation was to remain a leitmotif of our friendship.

A glance at the actual dates, though, shows me that Brodsky became an involuntary exile in June 1972, so that by the end of November, when he and his mentor came to London, he had been in the West for at least five months and was scarcely "fresh" from Russia. In any case, Auden, who died the following year, on this occasion protected the young poet, bodily interposing himself between Brodsky and the curious, journalists, scholars or what have you.

Auden read at each of the annual Poetry Internationals, up to the time of his death, whether formally invited to or not. Brodsky, for his part, had been invited to the London Poetry International, as well as to the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, in I970, but at the time was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In any case Auden, evidently, did not ask anyone's permission, just informed the organizers that he was bringing Brodsky with him.

This must have been Joseph's first public reading in the West. Even the normally reserved British public was moved by the sight of the young poet and by his emotional if stentorian recitation. Joseph stood on the stage, textless, his hands hanging by his side, or thrust into his jacket pockets. His head thrown back, he declaimed the poems, staring into the air above his listeners, as if communing with himself rather than addressing an audience. From time to time, there was a catch in his voice, a gasp, a sob almost. It seemed as if only his being on stage, speaking the words he had written, held him together. He was his words, his poems. An English reader? There must have been. (There was: Robert Lowell.) At one point, Joseph forgot a line. He stopped, looked down, screwed up his eyes in concentration, pounding his forehead, a gesture that became familiar to later audiences. The forgetting was palpable. Then the poem was found again. This, too, was palpable ...

Whether you understood Russian or not, you understood Brodsky that night. When he ended, his audience was as stunned as the poet on stage was now silent - inaccessible, emptied, a kind of simulacrum of himself. It was as if the air had been drained of sound. And the appropriate response would have been that - a soundlessness, in which you would hear only your own breathing, be aware only of your own physicality, your isolated self ...

I strung these rather inchoate fragments together, only a few hours after learning of Joseph's death: he died on Sunday, 28 January, 1996. Irina Muravyov, a Russian fiction-writer living in Boston and editing Bostonskoe vremya [Boston Times], had phoned me with the news and asked me if I'd give her something for Russkaya mysl [Russian Thought]. I agreed, because it seemed better than refusing. And since I had to start somewhere, I started there, with my first memory of Joseph. Afterwards, I began reading or re-reading what he had written, hearing it, the poems in his own English, in the original Russian, the essays; and Watermark, his book about Venice, which I had not been able to get through before. Now, having read it once, I began it again without a pause ... But then I stopped myself ...

What of Auden, after all? With the exception of a few poems, his work had never appealed to me (Joseph's fierceness in his defence puzzled me at the time, although I didn't care to investigate). Even the splendour of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats". Why was this? At one time, I speculated that it might have something to do with my Jewishness and his Englishness, but being Jewish doesn't explain everything! I turned to Joseph's pieces on Auden, in his first essay collection Less Than One (1987): "On 'September I, 1939' by W.H. Auden" and "To Please a Shadow". I wanted to learn more about this enthusiasm of his, his reverence for the man and the poet. Why? What?
    Acute though its critical insights were, the first essay, a kind of explication de texte, did not hold my chronicler-with-a-bad- memory's attention. But "To Please a Shadow" did. Joseph tells of his arrival in Austria, his meeting with Auden, on 6 June, forty-eight hours after his departure from Leningrad, and his attendance at the Poetry International in London, a fortnight or so later (Poetry International '72 ran from 19-24 of June). It is not clear from this account whether he actually stayed with Auden in the village of Kirchstetten (not Vienna), though it is clear that Auden literally took him under his wing - like a "mother-hen", as Charles Osborne, Director of Poetry International, later (1980) put it: "Wystan fussed about him like a mother-hen. An unusually knowing and understanding mother-hen." (1) Actually, Joseph was met in Austria by the late Carl Proffer, Professor of Russian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Proffer secured a university appointment for Joseph as poet-in-residence. What at once struck me was that my dates had been wrong.
    In the same essay, Joseph remarks how he could scarcely credit it that, back in 1939, an English poet had said: "Time ... worships language" (actually, in the unrevised version of TT Auden's poem on the death of Yeats). Across the cultural and generational divide he recognized a fellow language-traveller ...
    So, an invitation (" c/o W. H. Auden") arrived for Joseph to participate in the Poetry International. Obviously it wasn't that Auden simply "brought him along". True, they booked on the same flight, but Joseph by then was already finding his feet. Evidently, an aristocratic connection of his (Olga Razumovsky) persuaded British European Airways to give the two poets the VIP treatment. And, finally, the reading was in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a capacious enough place, but not on the scale of the Festival Hall. Arguably, I suppose, my hyperboles convey something of the excitement that surrounded Joseph's appearance. Joseph himself, on the other hand, is virtually silent about it, referring only to Auden's performance (Auden, too, recited his poetry by heart). Indeed, were it not that Joseph had already mentioned being invited to take part, one would hardly know, from his account, that he did read. He also alludes to himself and Auden reading together "again" and in the same place, presumably at Poetry International '73, a year later. Joseph remarks of Auden's earlier reading: "If I ever wished for time to stop, it was then, inside that large dark room, on the south bank of the Thames." The fact is that Auden had been an inspiration to him for some years before they met ...

Joseph's death has sent me to his words, which is why what was intended simply as a record of what I remember has already turned into something even more problematical. Sadly, though perhaps understandably, it has taken his death to make me read him attentively, as though his living presence was as much as I could cope with before. This sounds improbable or plain silly, but perhaps I was trying to read him through himself, almost reluctantly referring to the actual words on the actual page. So, now I am doubly obsessed by these same words - confusingly, there being so many, or rather their being so imbued with Joseph's life, yes, the very sound of him ...

I had assumed that it was either there - that is, in the Festival Hall, or rather Queen Elizabeth Hall- or at a reception (though I have no actual memory of a reception) that Joseph inscribed my copy of A Halt in the Wilderness. However, the significance of the date, 29 November 1972, has just dawned on me. So convinced was I that he had inscribed the book at Poetry International, that I mentally shifted the latter's date to accommodate this misapprehension. It is now clear that he inscribed the book on some other occasion, probably somewhere else, perhaps even in my home. What does it matter? All the same, I'd like to know. But in any case, book or no book, we did meet at the Festival.

It is possible that Joseph had come across my name because of  my association with Ted Hughes, with whom, in 1964-5, I had started the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, publishing translations of East European poetry and to a lesser extent of poetry from Russia itself. Ted Hughes was one of the originators of Poetry International. I myself was trying to translate contemporary Russian poetry, concentrating on work that had appeared after Stalin's death in 1953, especially of the so-called "thaw" period. So, Joseph gave me the impression of being familiar with what I had done.

His trial, in Leningrad, in February 1964, and the sentence of five years' hard labor for "social parasitism", meaning not so much political dissent, as an unorthodox or unconventional style of life - in a totalitarian state, the distinction in any case was academic - had attracted international attention. The trial itself included some memorable exchanges between the accused and the court, which were bravely noted down at the time and widely reported in the West. Perhaps the most notorious example:

JUDGE: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
BRODSKY: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?
JUDGE: And did you study this?
BRODSKY: This?
JUDGE: To become a poet. You have not tried to enter the university where they give instruction ... where they study ...
BRODSKY: I did not think ... I did not think that this was a matter of instruction.
JUDGE: What is it then?
BRODSKY: I think that it is ... from God."

This still takes my breath away! God? His seriousness, sincerity is unmistakable. No irony, not at that time. Or was he simply at a loss for words? Did he fall back in defiance - although the tone here suggests confusion rather than defiance - on the concept of God, anathema to the atheistic state, even in its milder post- Stalinist form? There is a certain helplessness, as though he'd no alternative but to plainly state what he believed ...
    Do what he might to deflect questions about the trial, Joseph could not prevent its becoming an ingredient in the legend constructed around him. ("Legend", I hear him exclaim, as he did once when questioned about Solzhenitsyn, "what legend?" (3). For me, to read was to translate; that is, I could not absorb what was on the page, without actually drafting a translation (as a child who is learning to read might have to mouth the words). In this manner, I had translated some poems of Brodsky, although he was not among my Russian poets. To some extent, this was due to my not having discovered him for myself, discovery being more than half the game for the talent-spotter in me. I would read poems that appealed to me as I tried to make sense of the texts; then I'd scribble rough translations of the marked texts, this process serving either to confirm my initial response or not. Brodsky was already celebrated, already being translated by a number of people, even if the American George Kline (Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr) was still his principal translator. But it was not so much that I was reluctant to jump onto what might already be construed as a bandwagon, as that it did not interest me enough to do so. Brodsky's verse appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation only some years later, in I977, when "Lagoon", a poem I had translated at the author's prompting, was reprinted in a feature on Russian émigré poetry. I had also published a translation of "The Jewish Cemetery in Leningrad", the only one of his poems relating specifically to his Jewishness, and I was translating some early poems, sketches of boyhood friends: "From a School Anthology". In addition, I began a translation of a strange narrative poem, "Kholmy" (Hills), from Ostanovka v pustyne, the first (unauthorized) Russian-language collection of his work, published abroad. (My copy of this book has now vanished, and I fantasize that all this writing has dematerialized it!)
    In general, though, my Russian was not up to the task of translating Brodsky's poetry and, apart from several arguably atypical autobiographical pieces, I was not particularly drawn to it either. It was too intellectual for me, too formal. What engaged me at the time was poetry that eschewed the Poetic that unadornedly conveyed a determination to survive, what it took to remain human in a mass age and against the background of World War, Holocaust, and the violently repressive post-War regimes of the Soviet Bloc countries. But although the difference between Brodsky and the admired East European poets loomed large for me, it apparently did not for others, Roger Garfitt, for instance, who observed that the Russian poet perhaps benefited from the current interest in Eastern Europe. (4)

From Russia with Love