Joseph Brodsky @ Toronto Oct 1995

This interview took place at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in October 1995. Joseph Brodsky and I met in a small, shabby dressing room just to the right of the stage. Brodsky seemed almost as nervous as I was and chain-smoked through the entire ninety minutes that we were together. My first impression was of a man whose health might be precarious and who spent far too much time at his desk, like W. H. Auden, his idol. I broke the ice by telling him that I had previously interviewed Czeslaw Milosz for the CBC a couple of days after he won the Nobel and that Brodsky would be my second and probably last winner of the prize. He asked me whether Milosz, whom he knew very well, had smiled during our time together. I told him he hadn't during the interview, but I remembered a guarded smile during a dinner we had in 1989 after the fall of the evil empire. I followed up by reassuring him that I wouldn't be asking him any personal questions. The focus would be on his writing, his career, and poetry in Russian and English. We talked for a few minutes about Akhmatova and Mandelstam, and I had just finished giving him the lead-off question when the emcee came in. He began by telling us the latest news about Princess Diana's love life and asking, "Is there anyone who hasn't slept with her?" I immediately put up my hand. Brodsky's response was more interesting and volatile. The blood had rushed to his face and he barked out in his Russian-scented English, "Never forget, sir, that she is royalty and you aren't." It occurred to me that perhaps I should save the situation, but my mind seized up and all I could think of saying was something like, "How about those Leafs?" Fortunately one of the stagehands came by at that moment to tell us that there were about five hundred people in the packed room, the cameras were ready, and it was showtime. I didn't get a chance to tell Brodsky my favorite Nobel Prize joke.

... Ông ta [the emcee] bắt đầu nói về những tin tức mới nhất về cuộc đời tình ái của Princees Diana, và hỏi: “ Có ai chưa ngủ với công nương?"
Tôi [Solecki] liền giơ tay, câu trả lời của Brodsky thì mới thú vị, và bay bướm. Mặt ông ửng đỏ, và ông bật ra, bằng thứ tiếng Anh sặc mùi Nga: "Ðừng bao giờ quên, bướm của em là bướm vương giả, còn chim của bạn thì không!”

ss: One of the pleasures of introducing a Nobel Prize winner is that you can actually say, "This person needs no introduction" and mean it. But just in case there's one person here this afternoon who thinks we're meeting Czeslaw Milosz or another Nobel Prize winner, here's a brief introduction to Joseph Brodsky. He was born in Leningrad in 1940 and established his reputation as a poet in the decade prior to being compelled to leave the Soviet Union in 1972. He has lived in the United States for the past quarter-century, and he became a citizen in 1977. His first book in English appeared in 1973, translated by George Kline. A selected poems, it was a remarkable breakthrough, with a foreword by W. H. Auden. This was followed by A Part of Speech in 1980 and To Urania in 1988. He has also published Less Than One, a collection of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It's going to be followed, in a few months, by another collection of essays, even though he has in the past spoken rather disparagingly of prose. [This collection was published in 1995 as On Grief and Reason.] His most recent book is Watermark, a meditation on Venice. [A third collection of poetry in English, So Forth, was in press upon his death in 1996, and all his English poems and self-translations were collected in Collected Poems in English in 2000.] Even before he received the Nobel Prize in 1987, there was a consensus among Russian and English-speaking critics that he is the major poet of the post-Akhmatova generation. I assume this canonical judgment probably leaves Mr. Brodsky looking nervously over his shoulder, worrying whether he's accompanied by Euterpe, one of the muses of poetry, or Nemesis.

I'm very happy to welcome Joseph Brodsky to Harbourfront, and I will begin by asking him about what might be called a linguistic ambiguity in his career.

Mr. Brodsky, you have written poems both in English and in Russian. You're not unique in writing in two languages, but it's relatively rare for a major poet to do so. Offhand, I can think of Rilke and Celan. Do you ever have a moment of crisis when you sit down to write a poem and find yourself wondering which language to choose?

JB: No. No, it doesn't happen that way. Well, to begin with, I don't write poems in English that often. I just simply, how should I put it? I do it as a sort of sideshow; and precisely because it is a sideshow, it has in itself an answer to your question. I do it simply because, now and then, I have almost a desire to do something different. But it's usually best to resist that desire and control myself, not to yield to that temptation, not to abandon myself, so to speak. The Russians would say, Don't abandon your own culture, don't cross over. But temptations are a tricky thing. If you do resist them for too long, that leads to neurosis; so my policy, if there is any, is to deal with them from time to time. Well, that's one thing. But sometimes I simply have to write a rhyme. I'm basically, by and large, a traditional poet who writes in rhymes, and it's the rhyme that suggests the language of a poem. And it's either an English rhyme or a Russian rhyme. That's the way it starts.

ss: What happens when you translate? What happens to the rhymes? I mean, the first thing lost in translation is the original soundscape.

JB: Indeed. Yes, well, that doesn't bother me very much, basically. Actually, it's not that it doesn't bother me, it bothers me a little. [laughter] What you are aiming at is to get perhaps the same level of intelligence in the translated rhyme that is there in the original. If I pride myself on anything, I pride myself on the quality of my rhymes, above all. If I have any ambition, indeed it's to be considered a good rhymer. [laughter] 

ss: That's not a meagre ambition for a traditional poet, for a classical poet, given your roots, your background.

JB: The main question with free verse-it's not my expression, it's Eliot's-the main question with free verse is, Free from what? The whole point is that, well, free verse has emerged presumably as a monument of a personal departure, of a personal crisis, of this or that great individual. In English it would be Eliot. The crucial word, the crucial aspect, is development. And you can't have development without some great change. And people who undertake to write poetry in free verse simply have to, in a sense, repeat the same development. Otherwise they just buy the net result, they repeat what they have read, what they have inherited. Remember Goethe's warning that you must earn what you inherit. It's really daunting because you have no sense of freedom unless you've worked for it.

ss: Would you qualify that remark, or that kind of criticism, with reference to someone like Czeslaw Milosz, who begins as a very formal poet and then moves back and forth between free and more traditional verse? 

JB: Indeed, what happened to him is exactly the same thing that occurred in the case of, well, Eliot and Pound. They started as highly formal poets. If it's a cultural development, if it's a natural development, if it's organic, well then we have to get to the entire organism of a culture, the entire nature of its poetry. I do on occasion write something in free verse, indeed in Russian or in English. But you don't get the sense of cadence in the language you write unless, well, unless you already have it in your bloodstream, the beats, the rhythm because it's your first language. Well, that's my belief. I don't believe I'm mistaken. [laughter]

ss: Let me pursue this question of translation. In one of your essays, you describe bringing Mandelstam's poems in translation to Auden, and Auden not being convinced of Mandelstam's greatness. I think we have all had a disappointing experience reading Goethe, Pushkin, or Heine in translation. Of the four major Russian poets whose tradition you're carrying on-Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova-which one do you think is the easiest to translate and most rewarding when read in translation?

JB: Oh, Miss Akhmatova. Theoretically and pracctically, in many ways, Akhmatova. The thing with Akhmatova, the reason I'm saying Akhmatova, well, she's sort of, if you will, a minimalist. She resorts to very simple means.

And I would think a translation of her poetry can be done in English effectively. I can think of an American poet similar to her, Louise Bogan. In both of them, the poet starts and from the first line you are right there, you're in business. There is no warming up. And Akhmatova never wrote anything on an epic scale. Her longest work was something like four hundred lines.

ss: Do you like the Max Hayward/Stanley Kunitz versions of the poems?

JB: No. Well, I'm afraid that I made enemies with Mr. Kunitz over that. [laughter]

ss: I'll take that question back.

JB: No, no. There are also the translations by what's his name? Walter Arndt. It's a good edition, except that ... well, he embarked on a big project, he tried to do quite a lot. Something like over a hundred poems. And presumably he was doing that in one sitting. Not in one sitting perhaps. Well, in a year or two. So in that they became a little soupy, they're watered down a bit. There is also the two-volume edition of the collected poems by Judith Hemschemeyer, a Slavicist, and Roberta Reeder, Akhmatova's biographer. But that's done in what amounts to free verse, and we would think that once we've got the free verse, once we don't have the constraints of rhyme, well, it's not quite Akhmatova. Besides, the idea of translating a poet into a different language, well, perhaps it bespeaks chutzpah rather than intelligence.

ss: Yet you have been translating since the 1960s when you did versions of Polish, Spanish, and Serbo-Croation poems as well as poems by Eliot, Auden, and Donne. Have you ever been tempted, given your present command of English, to translate Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, or Pasternak?

JB: I've done a little here and there, but not much.

I translated a few poems of Mandelstam, I translated a few poems of Tsvetaeva, I translated a couple of Pasternak's, a couple of Nabokov's. I didn't try Akhmatova, because, well ... I don't really know why. Maybe it's because there are so many other translations today, almost a translation industry. It's rather interesting it's happening this way because I think you would agree with me that me that if you look back, practically in every decade, starting somewhere in the I960s, a great Russian poet from the past has emerged in English. Pasternak, then Akhmatova, and then Mandelstam. And finally now Marina Tsvetaeva. It's very interesting how we can always identify a decade by a particular poet. But there's something more to say about this, and the emergence of those great four. Of course, there weren't only four. There were several other poets who were completely overlooked. Within two or three more decades, we'll see a revival- or an arrival, rather-of people like Vladislav Khodasevich. But what's interesting about the four is I think they will always remain the four.

ss: Akhmatova has a poem called "We Four." It's quite short, and it might be worth reading even if it is the Hayward/Kunitz version.

Herewith I solemnly renounce my hoard
of earthly goods, whatever counts as chattel.
The genius and guardian angel of this place
has changed to an old tree-stump in the water.
Earth takes us in awhile as transient guests;
we live by habit, which we must unlearn.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friends, two voices, talking in their turn. 

Did I say two? ... There by the eastern wall,
where criss-cross shoots of brambles trail,
a look!-that fresh dark elderberry branch
is like a letter from Marina in the mail.

November 1961 (in delirium)

JB: Yes, that's right. The poem suggests a very peculiar aspect that you might think doesn't directly belong to the reading or history of poetry, but it's a very humane aspect. Four poets who at some deep level belong together. If you think about ancient Rome, well you can think also about four important poets. You can think about Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Propertius, though he's a little chronologically off. But even if Propertius is a bit later than the others, he's still related to them and the time. What we're talking about here is four very well-known poets and an era. And both in Rome and Russia they arrived, those poets, at a time of great crisis in their societies, on the eve of the great war and revolution in Russia and at the time of civil war and Augustus in Rome. And that's why they will remain important in this way, no matter the presence of other people with great talent, and there were many. The four will remain.

is: You've written relatively critically of Russian prose during the Soviet era. You singled out Andrei Platonov as an exception. I think you also mentioned Boris Pilnyak?

JB: No, no. Not Pilnyak.

ss: Okay, so we'll stick with Platonov. With his exception, you were fairly gloomy about the history and prospects of Russian prose during the Soviet era. Your essays reminded me, in fact, of Gunter Grass writing after the Second World War, I think in the 1950S and 1960s, about the damage that had been done to German prose and German poetry by the enforced propagandistic, didactic attitude to language during the Nazi era. Do you have a sense that Russian literature can recover from nearly a century of abuse?

JB: You know, I think it will take less time for Russian to recover its health. Russia is a very populous country, and the language is such that given the size of, the volume of, the nation and the number of practitioners involved, it's bound to generate something rather quickly out of its JB historical situation. The thing is that even now there's a wonderful process going on. I don't really keep both my eyes on what's going on. It's one eye, perhaps. [laughter] Even the one eye blinks now and then because there's a great deal of literary and cultural activity. The poetry's rather wonderful. The vitality of it today is just, well, extraordinary. Nobody knows a thing about it here in the West. Now it's even getting more difficult because in the bad old days there was a centralization of the culture. So whoever was at the top or in a prominent position or whatever was at least well known. So therefore a reputation could be created fast, or faster than now, because now it's all decentralized. It's, for all intents and purposes, like the situation in the West. We don't know our poets to begin with. That's one point. Another point is we pay attention to one or two at the expense of all the others. What's in general quite peculiar is the tendency of any culture to appoint at a certain period, a certain decade, a certain era, a certain generation, but very often even for a century, one great poet. It has to do obviously with laziness on the part of the reading public, also on the part of those who are in charge of publicity and education. Providence takes care or tries to take care of humanity, of the nation, of the speakers of that language; it provides the public, the nation, with poets. Well, they elect one or two and push all the rest to the side.

ss: Since you've mentioned great poets, I wonder if we could turn the conversation to one of the century's greatest, Wystan Hugh Auden.

JB: Gladly. [laughter]

ss: You mention in your essay "To Please a Shadow" that one of the reasons that you learned English, or became more and more deeply involved with it, was "to find myself in closer proximity to the man who I consider the greatest mind of the twentieth century, Wystan Hugh Auden." And then you discuss his various qualities. The ones I particularly like are his "equipoise" and "wisdom." What has Auden's role been in your career as a poet?

JE: I'll answer this question if I can. He entered me, in a sense, he entered my life. We are speaking, well, I am sitting here and I feel that I am part him. You may take me to the loony bin right away. [laughter] I spoke earlier today about him, and basically one doesn't want to repeat oneself within the course of a day, but perhaps I should. When I met him twenty-two years ago in 1972, I was thirty-two years old and he had only one year left to live. I knew fairly little about him. I knew about some of his poems. I had translated some in Russia. It had all started rather in a peculiar way, in a funny way. In 1965, I showed my poems to a great friend of mine, and he read them and he said, Well, it's so much like Auden, it sounds much like Auden. And to my ears-remember, it's the 1960s-it was a great compliment in many ways because in the 1960s, all we knew about poetry in English was T. S. Eliot and then Auden. If you can imagine my English, this English, let's say thirty-five years ago, I tried to make my way through his poems. When I met him I knew some twenty or thirty poems of his. The one long poem I had read by that time was "Letter to Lord Byron," which is a great work. At any rate, then he dies, and then I begin to read him more seriously, and this grows year after year after year. He's been growing in me ever since. It's a very peculiar process. Well, I said he has entered me. Indeed. I think I can take practically anything because he took so much. I am prepared to die because he died. I would like to be as intelligent as he was. And it's a wonderful intelligence, it's a flattering intelligence. When you read him, he flatters you. He makes you intelligent. It's impossible to say the same about anyone else I know. I don't really know what to say, but I could say a lot more. [laughter] 

ss: In the same essay you talk about how it's imporrtant for every reader to have at least one poet that they love cover to cover. Auden is obviously one of the poets you are devoted to. Who are some of the other poets you think highly of? For instance, would you approve of someone devoting themselves to the poetry of Eugenio Montale to the extent that you have devoted yourself to Auden's?

JB: Oh yes, Montale is worth it, definitely. I think since this is a predominantly English-speaking country I will speak of English poets. I would say that Thomas Hardy is definitely worth it. You should read him, a wonderful poet. He's one of the greatest figures, though a far greater poet than a prose writer. I would also include Robert Frost, no question about it. I think perhaps I'm even closer to Frost than to Auden. It's a more tempting posture. Do you remember when Lionel Trilling called him a terrifying or terrible poet? I wouldn't recommend Wallace Stevens. He's no doubt an important figure, but for me, he's far too much of a fantasizing aesthete. I mean this as a compliment, not a put-down, but it would take too long to explain what I mean. [laughter] I would say Eliot, of course. I would also say Elizabeth Bishop. She is Canadian by birth. So there are plenty. And obviously, as I speak, you probably know, when you talk in this manner you overlook somebody and then it comes back to you. Among the foreigners, those who I wanted to read in translation, well, you've got Milosz already. I would add two more Polish poets. One is Zbigniew Herbert, and another is Wislawa Szymborska, a wonderful lady.

ss: Both write in free verse.

JB: Both of them do. But they've earned the right to do so, and I'll tell you why. It's not exactly my argument; it's Milosz's own argument. In his Norton Lectures, I think, he puts forth the following idea to explain why Polish poetry is abandoning traditional metres. It's because, he says, in Poland the traditional verse has been identified with the culture and world order that brought the country to catastrophe. So, in a sense, traditional verse is the verse of the old guys, the past.

ss: I asked Czeslaw Milosz about a week after he won the Nobel Prize whether he ever worried about losing his command of Polish because of his long exile. Has this ever troubled you?

JB: Yes, I worried about that. Especially initially, I did. Now I don't, perhaps to my own detriment, but I don't. I'm simply of the mind that we're all being brought up to believe that it's the diction of the street, of the people, that literature should abide by. I'm of the opinion that it's the other way around. It's the street that should abide by the language of literature. Dante is an illustrious example. I think Italians today speak, or at least are capable of speaking, not the discourse of the street or television but of their literature. When I feel anxious about all this I think about somebody like the great Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who wrote in a language that wasn't Greek. It wasn't demotic or what the Greeks calls katharevousa. At best it was the idiom of the Greek colony in Alexandria, in Egypt. And yet it resulted in great poetry.

ss: As you know, Cavafy was also a favorite of Auden's, who wrote a fine appreciation of his poetry. Now that we have circled back to the beginning, perhaps this is a good place to stop. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on poetry with us this afternoon.