The Best Russian Poetry Written TodaySeptember 7, 1980 The Best Russian Poetry Written Today A PART OF SPEECH By Joseph Brodsky. Joseph Brodsky has become such a fixture of our literary landscape - in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and on the poetry reading circuit - that it is perhaps necessary to remind the reader that he was exiled from Russia only eight years ago, at the age of 32, having previously been sentenced to five years of hard labor for the crime of ''social parasitism'' (living on poetry and translation and, incidentally, being a Jew). He now lives with impunity on poetry and on whatever emolument derives from his affiliations with the University of Michigan, New York University and Columbia University. To vary the trendy maxim, writing well is the best revenge. This is Brodsky's second collection of poems to appear in English. The translation of ''Selected Poems''(1973) was the work of one man, George Kline, who was for long Brodsky's single English voice. The present volume contains translations by 10 English and American poets, to say nothing of Brodsky himself, who singlehandedly translated two poems (including the important title piece) and declares in a diffident note that he has also ''taken the liberty of reworking'' his collaborators' versions, ''though perhaps at the expense of their smoothness.'' He also wrote the splendid elegy on the death of Robert Lowell directly in English (the choice of English was in itself a graceful enhancement of this tribute to his friend and early champion). Notwithstanding this evidence of his incipient metamorphosis into an American writer, Brodsky continues to write almost exclusively in his native Russian - though the sad doppler effect of its recession into his past troubles him no less than it does all other writers living in banishment. There are 37 poems here in all, dated from 1965 to 1978. Three are reprinted from the earlier collection in much altered form - revised by Brodsky, I presume, and usually for the better, as when the Watergate-contaminated phrase ''this point in time'' becomes ''this present hour.'' It seems altogether appropriate that Brodsky's lyrical persona, a protean figure to whom we have by now become fairly accustomed, should be represented by a multiplicity of English voices. Even what might elsewhere seem the uncomfortable jostling of British and American diction contributes here to the impression of uprootedness. A restless wanderer, alternately peevish and amused, outraged and remorseful, belligerent and resigned, this persona speaks, as Richard Eder aptly remarked in a recent New York Times interview, ''with the playfulness that has weariness at its center.'' Though his attitude toward exile, longing, solitude and the insulting dilemmas of growing older may waver, we can only feel grateful that the result is the same: a transmutation of this experience into the most powerful, the most technically accomplished, erudite, wide ranging and consistently astonishing Russian poetry being written today. If we adopt Auden's rule that a minor poet is one whose later works cannot be distinguished from his earlier, then Brodsky is indisputably major, for it should be clear even to those who must read him in English alone that he is probing new themes with greater freedom, confidence and verbal resource. Like the Auden who was, no less than Lowell, his champion, Brodsky is a master of traditional forms. He is now less constricted than formerly by the emphatic meters and rhymes that persist as the norm of Russian verse, but an occasional set-piece, such as the elegy on the death of Marshall Zhukov, can suggest to the English reader one of the limits of Brodsky's range. Zhukov, the admiring friend of Eisenhower, suffered humiliation in his beloved Russia after having repulsed Hitler's armies. The ideal Russian reader for whom Brodsky writes would immediately detect the echoes of a famous tribute by the 18th-century poet Derzhavin to a similar military figure. By the unobtrusive means of meter alone Brodsky is thus able to tie many knots of history and subversive emotion. The fine translation by George Kline preserves the halting march of the funeral procession: Columns of grandsons, stiff at attention; gun carriage, coffin, riderless horse. Wind brings no sound of their glorious Russian trumpets, their weeping trum- pets of war. Splendid regalia deck out the corpse: thundering Zhukov rolls toward death's mansion. Brodsky has often resorted to such allusions. In 1966 he recited to me (wittily enough, just beneath the Kremlin walls) his thenunpublished elegy on the death of T.S. Eliot, and the deliberate echo of an earlier model, Auden's elegy on Yeats, was immediately perceptible. The form alone was speaking with its mute but unmistakeable eloquence, and the Russian poet's moving lines extended to include two other great poets -tradition and the individual talent, as it were. Literary echoes of a somewhat more obvious and less functional sort might possibly offend the ear of the ideal English reader. There is for instance a good deal too much muffled Auden in the poem ''Strophes,'' and for no discernible reason: You know, dear, all whom an- guish pleads for, those out of reach, are prey of the laws of language - periods, commas, speech. It is perhaps not surprising that some of the best poems of this bleakly undomiciled voice are those attached to places, which range from Norenskaya, the site of his Russian exile (identified in the sardonic note as ''a village of 14 dwellings in the Archangel region of the USSR, where the author temporarily resided in 1964-65'') to the far-flung locales of his foreign exile: the Italy of the Russian poets Akhmatova and Mandelstam, cozy England, a Lake District which wittily turns out to be inhabited by Michigan undergraduates, not Wordsworth, and, finally, Cape Cod in the boozy but wonderfully accomplished meditation translated by Anthony Hecht and entitled ''Lullaby of Cape Cod'': I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know what the globe itself must feel: there's nowhere to go. Brodsky's love of Lowell did not extend to an endorsement of that poet's relaxed view of translation as ''imitation.'' It is therefore hardly surprising that his self-translation, constrained as it is by the dream of congruence in meter, rhyme and meaning, should fall short of his original composition in English. The 15 poems of the second part of the book are at times dictionary-haunted (a centuryold chestnut tree is called ''secular''), at times idiomatically unfocused (as when the now rather quaint epithet ''blasted'' must be summoned out of retirement to rhyme with ''wasted''), at times incomprehensible. But the powerful elegy to Lowell, since it is not a translation and has only itself to think about, unfolds with a serene and compelling mastery. Here is the third part: Planes at Logan thunder off from the brown mass of industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss. When Brodsky first shouted an English poem by George Herbert into my ear outside a cafe on Gorky Street 14 years ago, I thought he was speaking Lithuanian. Now his English suffices for this stately elegy on Lowell, and one looks forward to the sequel. Clarence Brown, Professor of Comparative Literatureat Princeton, is the author of ''Mandelstam.'' © Copyright: Борис Рубежов Пятая Страница, 2015.
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