ON THE OTHER hand, when Joseph left Russia, when he read for the first time in the West, at that poetry festival in London, he may well have been quite surprised at the enthusiasm of the audience. It is conceivable, even likely, that he had no inkling of what to expect. Of course, though still young, he was not new to the game. He had been translated, had become the object of what were in effect cultural pilgrimages, had been pilloried by the state, was close to the last of the great ones, Akhmatova. And then there were his readings in Russia (remember Etkind's description, cited above). I suppose he was already a cult figure, whatever that may mean, or well on his way to becoming one. So he was surely aware of the hallucinatory effect of his performances. Even so, there was no telling whether this would turn out to be exportable. Traumatized as Joseph evidently was, that first reading at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at once set him on the path. He gave reading after reading. He did not let the sound fade, or himself go out of fashion, be lost sight of. He kept himself, the sound of himself, current. In one respect, this can be seen as a triumph of the will to survive, though he may also have needed constant exposure of this sort to compensate for the loss of a native audience. And in any case, as we have seen, he regarded it as his particular mission - though he might have balked at putting it so grandly - to bring Russian to English. And beyond that, of course, was the larger mission, on behalf of Poetry itself. And there must have been a price to pay, that of privacy, of the seclusion most artists need. Still, he also had the invaluable knack of being just himself. And periodically, as at Christmas when he went to Venice, he became a "nobody in a raincoat".
    Or do I exaggerate? Was he, in fact, misled? Did he misunderstand the interest his person or presence aroused? Perhaps it was more a matter of curiosity. He had become a sort of institution, America's Poet-in-Exile. And as for his odd English, well, away with it, who cared really. It had seemed to me, from the start, that Joseph was a great improviser. He had not quite anticipated the reception he received, but he adjusted readily enough to it. And as for his style of reading, well, as noted, he claimed it was simply the way poetry was read in Russia. But even his disingenuousness worked to his advantage. So, perhaps it was all a kind of improvisation. He relied on the challenge of live situations, on his wit and his wits, on language itself. Joseph had faith. He adopted a casual manner, even though the delivery of the poetry was quite the opposite to casual. He resisted being turned into a monu
ment, an institution, although he himself raised monuments to those he regarded as his mentors: Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Frost, Auden.

Joseph had no training as a teacher. And not only did he not possess a so-called further degree, he had no degree at all. Nevertheless, in '74 or '75, having been invited to teach a poetry course at Iowa, I visited him in Amherst, seeking his advice. The very idea of teaching, for which I too had no training, petrified me. I simply could not visualize myself in front of a class, for three or four months. How did I get myself into this!
    We met for dinner, in the home of a mutual friend, Stavros Deligiorgis, who had been directing the Translation Workshop in Iowa, but was at this time a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts. I remember next to nothing of the evening and nothing of Emily Dickinson's home town; when I went there, a few years later, to give a talk at Amherst College, it might as well have been for the first time. But what does remain is Joseph's attempt to fill me with confidence. It went something like this: "There's nothing to worry about! As a European, you already have a huge advantage: you know things, this comes with the territory after all. So, all you have to do is talk. Anything you say will be news to them!" This advice turned out to be well founded. Plus my own realization that validating students is the key to "teaching". Though he validated me, Joseph apparently was not always so gentle with his students. Indeed, I am told that he was often quite scornful or sarcastic. However, he usually got maybe because he wasn't mean, though probably not everybody would agree with this.

It distresses me that I cannot remember his actual words. Joseph remembered his poems. Did he, like an actor, deliberately memorize them for readings, or were they already in his memory, retrievable at any time? I think the latter. They were there, together with many other poems, by other poets, Russian and English; Mark Strand recalls how at their first meeting Joseph recited a poem of his (Strand's) which Strand himself had forgotten. He remembered poems as sound, metrically, accenting the English ones in a Russian manner. Obviously, there is a difference between remembering verse and remembering spoken words, but I am still upset by my own very poor memory. Generally what I have at my disposal is an imperfect or approximate translation. And not just imperfect, incomplete, but often incorrect as well: in faulty English, or in a kind of translatorese; or even worse, a kind of pre-English, so that translating myself, as it were, is as frustrating as translating the poetry of others!

To be fair (or fairer) to myself, at least in Amherst, I may also have been embarrassed or uncomfortable with what he was saying. He seemed to be advocating what amounted to a kind of con. Instead of really applying myself, all I had to do was be European. And wasn't it invidious to suggest that young Americans were so ignorant, so impressionable and simple-minded really that we crafty Europeans could easily hold their attention simply by bulls hitting ? I felt it was dishonourable to concur with this - I was a Brit in the US, not a Russian political exile; perhaps he could be excused - but I raised no objections at the time. His assumption that, like him, I must have the wherewithal to instruct and entertain was flattering. And anyway, hadn't I rather invited this complicity by sharing my anxieties with him?

To sum up. From exile to commanding presence, despite his relative youth. Nothing could stop Brodsky. What if he had removed himself, become a recluse, like J. D. Salinger or Henry Roth? This was not an option. He made use of his renommée to do what had not been done before, to translate himself, to make the American "scene" move over for him. And he found friends, supporters, as well as admirers. I do not believe that his poetry alone, however brilliant, created the opening. Something to do with his actual presence, what he projected as a man, his fate or destiny, was responsible, even if he continued to insist that this destiny, Nobel prize and all, was an accident. And his poetry was more than the poems or even the sum of the poems. It represented and still does a kind of conjunction or collision of prosodies.

Joseph's poetry, I had from the start responded to his reading. It occurs to me that, although I might not initially have taken toI may have tried to find reasons not to do so, to resolve this apparent contradiction, to align myself, my responses, with what I thought, or thought I thought. But I failed. Joseph was extremely inventive, but his imagery often seemed contrived, fanciful. The conceits might entertain or impress, but I could not visualize them; they had no sensorial presence for me. At the same time, Joseph seemed to equate rhyme and metre with virtue, with ultimate worth. Incidentally, he also wrote about Mandelstam: "For him, a poem began with a sound, with a sonorous molded shape or form." Of course, many poets
(Housman, Eliot, for instance) have similarly tried to explain what happens when a poem is coming into existence; but somehow I had not thought of Brodsky as being in that company.