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