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Milosz
Milosz
Trong một tiểu luận, Brodsky
gọi Mandelstam là một thi sĩ của văn hóa. Brodsky chính
ông, cũng là 1 thi sĩ của văn hóa, và hẳn là
vì lý do này, ông tạo sự hài hòa
với dòng sâu thẳm của thế kỷ, trong đó con người, bị
đe dọa mất mẹ cái giống người, khám phá ra quá
khứ như là một mê cung chẳng hề có tận cùng. Lặn
sâu vô mê cung, chúng ta khám phá
ra cái gì sống sót quá khứ là kết quả
của nguyên lý phân biệt dựa trên đẳng cấp. Mandelstam,
ở trong Gulag, điên khùng bới đống rác tìm đồ
ăn, [ui chao lại nhớ Giàng Búi], là thực tại về độc
tài bạo chúa và sự băng hoại thoái hoá
bị kết án phải tuyệt diệt. Mandelstam đọc thơ cho vài bạn tù
là khoảnh khoắc thần tiên còn hoài hoài
Bài viết Sự
quan trọng của Simone Weil cũng quá tuyệt.
Bài nào đọc cũng tuyệt, khiến Gấu tự hỏi, tại làm sao
cũng CS, mà ở đó lại có những bậc như Brodsky, như Milosz,
thí dụ.
Bắc Kít, chỉ có
thứ nhà văn nhà thơ viết dưới ánh sáng của Đảng!
Cái vụ Tố Hữu khóc
Stalin thảm thiết, phải mãi gần đây Gấu mới giải ra được, sau
khi đọc một số bài viết của những Hoàng Cầm, Trần Dần, những
tự thú, tự kiểm, sổ ghi sổ ghiếc, hồi ký Nguyễn Đăng Mạnh...
Sự hèn nhát của sĩ phu Bắc Hà, không phải là
trước Đảng, mà là trước cá nhân Tố Hữu. Cả xứ
Bắc Kít bao nhiêu đời Tổng Bí Thư không có
một tay nào như xứng với Xì Ta Lin. Mà, Xì, như
chúng ta biết, suốt đời mê văn chương, nhưng không có
tài, tài văn cũng không, mà tài phê
bình như Thầy Cuốc, lại càng không, nên đành
đóng vai ngự sử văn đàn, ban phán giải thưởng, ra ơn
mưa móc đối với đám nhà văn, nhà thơ. Ngay cả
cái sự thù ghét của ông, đối với những thiên
tài văn học Nga như Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova… bây giờ
Gấu cũng giải ra được, chỉ là vì những người này dám
đối đầu với Stalin, không hề chịu khuất phục, hay "vấp ngã"!
Gấu tin là, Tố Hữu tự
coi ông như là Xì của xứ Bắc Kít. Ông còn
bảnh hơn cả Xì, vì là một thi sĩ thứ thực, nếu chúng
ta đọc dòng thơ cách mạng hồi ông còn trẻ. Tất
cả các văn nghệ sĩ Bắc Kít sở dĩ sợ Tố Hữu đến như thế, chính
là vì với họ, Tố Hữu là…. Xì Ta Lin mũi tẹt,
Bắc Kít!
Trong To Begin Where
I Am, Bắt đầu nơi tôi là, một tuyển tập tiểu luận của Czeslaw
Milosz, hai bài viết, về Pasternak và về Brodsky, thật tuyệt.
TV đã post bài viết về Brodsky, và thừa thắng xông
lên, bữa nay đi luôn bài về Pasternak, cũng đã
giới thiệu lai rai.
Lẽ tất nhiên, còn
nhiều bài thật thú, thí dụ, Chống lại thơ không
hiểu được, Against incomprehensible poetry. Hay “Thôi
thế thì thôi, đành thối thê”, [‘tạm’ dịch cái
tít “If only this could be said”, viết về tâm tư một tín
hữu, và nhà thơ Ky Tô, là ông, với câu
của Pascal là đề từ:
Chối từ, tin tưởng, nghi ngờ
tuyệt đối – đó là điều đối với con người y chang “phi” đối
với con ngựa.
[To deny, to believe, to doubt absolutely – this is for man what running
is for a horse].
Phải mất 36 năm, đám thi
sỡi nhà văn Bắc Kít một lòng một dạ viết dưới ánh
sáng của Đảng, mới "mơ hồ" hiểu ra được "phản biện", [không
có nghĩa là "deny" đâu nhé], nghĩa là gì!
Phản biện nghĩa là cãi
tí ti với Đảng, và sau đó, gật đầu OK, khi lãnh
lương Hội Nhà Văn, thí dụ!
In one of his essays Brodsky
calls Mandelstam a poet of culture. Brodsky was himself a poet of culture,
and most likely that is why he created in harmony with the deepest current
of his century, in which man, threatened with extinction, discovered his
past as a never-ending labyrinth. Penetrating into the bowels of the labyrinth,
we discover that whatever has survived from the past is the result of the
principle of differentiation based on hierarchy. Mandelstam in the Gulag,
insane and looking for food in a garbage pile, is the reality of tyranny
and degradation condemned to extinction. Mandelstam reciting his poetry to
a couple of his fellow prisoners is a lofty moment, which endures.
Milosz
Trong một tiểu luận, Brodsky
gọi Mandelstam là một thi sĩ của văn hóa. Brodsky chính
ông, cũng là 1 thi sĩ của văn hóa, và hẳn là
vì lý do này, ông tạo sự hài hòa
với dòng sâu thẳm của thế kỷ, trong đó con người, bị
đe dọa mất mẹ cái giống người, khám phá ra quá
khứ như là một mê cung chẳng hề có tận cùng. Lặn
sâu vô mê cung, chúng ta khám phá
ra cái gì sống sót quá khứ là kết quả
của nguyên lý phân biệt dựa trên đẳng cấp. Mandelstam,
ở trong Gulag, điên khùng bới đống rác tìm đồ
ăn, [ui chao lại nhớ Giàng Búi], là thực tại về độc
tài bạo chúa và sự băng hoại thoái hoá
bị kết án phải tuyệt diệt. Mandelstam đọc thơ cho vài bạn tù
là khoảnh khoắc thần tiên còn hoài hoài
Bài viết Sự
quan trọng của Simone Weil cũng quá tuyệt.
Bài nào đọc cũng tuyệt, khiến Gấu tự hỏi, tại làm sao
cũng CS, mà ở đó lại có những bậc như Brodsky, như Milosz,
thí dụ.
Bắc Kít, chỉ có
thứ nhà văn nhà thơ viết dưới ánh sáng của Đảng!
Cái vụ Tố Hữu khóc
Stalin, phải mãi gần đây Gấu mới giải ra được, sau khi đọc một
số bài viết của những Hoàng Cầm, Trần Dần, những tự thú,
tự kiểm, sổ ghi sổ ghiếc…
“Xì”
suốt đời mê văn chương, nhưng không có tài, nên
đành đóng vai ngự sử văn đàn, ban phán giải thưởng,
ra ơn mưa móc đối với đám nhà văn. Ngay cả cái
sự thù ghét của ông, đối với những thiên tài
văn học Nga như Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova… bây giờ Gấu cũng giải
ra được, chỉ là vì những người này dám đối đầu
với Stalin, không hề bị khuất phục.
Gấu tin là, Tố Hữu tự coi ông như là Xì của xứ
Bắc Kít. Ông còn bảnh hơn cả Xì, vì là
một thi sĩ thứ thực, nếu chúng ta đọc dòng thơ cách
mạng hồi ông còn trẻ. Tất cả các văn nghệ sĩ Bắc Kít
sở dĩ sợ Tố Hữu đến như thế, chính là vì với họ, Tố
Hữu là…. Xì Ta Lin mũi tẹt, Bắc Kít!
NOTES ABOUT BRODSKY
BRODSKY'S PRESENCE acted as a buttress and a point of reference for
many of his fellow poets. Here was a man whose work and life always reminded
us that despite what is so often said and written today, a hierarchy does
exist. This hierarchy is not deducible through syllogisms, nor can it be
decided upon by discussion. Rather, we confirm it anew every day by living
and writing. It has something in common with the elementary division into
beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, kindness and cruelty, freedom
and tyranny. Above all, hierarchy signifies respect for that which is elevated,
and disdain, rather than contempt, for that which is inferior.
The label "sublime" can be applied to Brodsky's
poetry. In his fate as a representative of man there was that loftiness
of thought which Pushkin saw in Mickiewicz: "He looked upon life from
on high."
In one of his essays Brodsky calls Mandelstam a
poet of culture. Brodsky was himself a poet of culture, and most likely
that is why he created in harmony with the deepest current of his century,
in which man, threatened with extinction, discovered his past as a never-ending
labyrinth. Penetrating into the bowels of the labyrinth, we discover that
whatever has survived from the past is the result of the principle of differentiation
based on hierarchy. Mandelstam in the Gulag, insane and looking for food
in a garbage pile, is the reality of tyranny and degradation condemned to
extinction. Mandelstam reciting his poetry to a couple of his fellow prisoners
is a lofty moment, which endures.
With his poems, Brodsky built a bridge across decades
of hackneyed Russian language to the poetry of his predecessors, to Mandelstam,
Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. He was not a political poet, for he did not want
to enter into polemics with an opponent that was hardly worthy of him.
Instead, he practiced poetry as a particular type of activity which was
not subject to any apparent dimensions of time.
To aim directly at a goal, refusing to be deflected by voices demanding
one's attention. This means one is capable of distinguishing what is important,
and hewing only to this goal. That is precisely what the great Russian
writers were able to do, and they deserve to be envied for that.
Brodsky's life and creative work aim straight at
fulfillment like an arrow at its target. Of course, this is a delusion,
just as with Pushkin or Dostoevsky. So one must conceive of it differently.
Fate aims straight for its target, while he who is ruled by fate is able to
decipher its main lines and understand, even if only vaguely, what he has
been called to.
A collection of interviews with Brodsky, Reszty
nie trzeba [Keep the Change], in Jerzy lllg's translation, is a constant
source of wonderment for me.* Just to think how much he had to leave out
- what for others was the very essence of the twentieth century: Marxism-Leninism,
Sovietism, nationalism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, Surrealism, as well
as a dozen or two other isms.
He could have become a dissident, engage, like his
friend Tomas Venclova. He could have thought about reforming the state.
He could have written avant-garde poems. He could have been a Freudian. He
could have paid homage to structuralism. Nothing of the sort.
Life as a moral fable. The poet imprisoned and condemned
by the state, then sent into exile by the state, and after his death,
the head of that state kneeling beside his coffin. A fairy tale, yet it
did happen like that, in our hardly fairy-tale-like century.
He spoke as one who has authority. Most likely in
his youth he was unbearable because of that self-assurance, which those
around him must have seen as arrogance. That self-assurance was a defense
mechanism in his relations with people and masked his inner irresolution
when he felt that he had to act that way, and only that way, even though
he did not know why. Were it not for that arrogance, he would not have
quit school. Afterward, he often regretted this, as he himself admitted.
During his trial, someone who was less self-assured than he was could probably
not have behaved as he did. He himself did not know how he would behave,
nor did the authorities foresee it; rather, they did not anticipate that,
without meaning to, they were making him famous.
When he was fourteen years old, he passed the entrance
exam to the naval academy and was rejected only because of what was
recorded in his identity papers under the heading "nationality." I try
to imagine him as a cadet. An officer? Lermontov?
Both he and his Petersburg friends behaved in the
way Alekksander Wat had wished for Russian literature: that it would "break
with the enemy." They did not want to be either Soviets or anti-Soviets;
they wanted to be a-Soviet. Certainly, Brodsky was not a political poet.
Nonetheless, he wrote a number of occasional poems (on the funeral of Marshal
Zhukov, the war in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, martial law in Poland),
and in a speech at the University of Silesia he thanked Poland for her contribution
to overturning a great evil, Communism. In response to the news that the
Institute and Academy of Art and Literature in New York had voted in Evgeny
Evtushenko as a foreign member, he made his protest known by resigning from
the institute.
Submitting to the element of language, or (because
this was the same thing for him) to the voice of the Muse, he asserted that
a poet must want to please not his contemporaries but his predecessors. The
predecessors whose names he mentioned were Lomonosov, Kantemir, Derzhavin,
Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova. His kingdom of Russian poetry
endured above and outside of history, in accordance with his conviction
that language has its own greatness and selects its own people to serve
it.
He was capable of idolizing others. He used to say
that he would be satisfied if he were called Auden's epigone. He did not
rule out those who wrote in "free verse" but he paid particular homage to
metrical poets: Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke. He understood
poetry to be a dialogue across the ages, and so he conversed with Horace
and Ovid (in Russian translations). As he said, he liked Ovid more, because
of his images, even though he was less interesting rhythmically, adhering
to the traditional hexameter. Horace, on the other hand, with the immense
metrical variety of his stanzas, invited Brodsky to compete with him.
It would be a mistake to imagine Brodsky as a bohemian poet, although
if we define bohemia as a milieu on the margins of society and the state,
he belonged to it in his youth in Leningrad. He was competent in various
trades, and they were by no means mere fictions, useful only as proof of
employment. He often "plowed like an ox." He spoke with gratitude of the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, because it offered employment to "the
laziest man under the sun," who did not know English. He treated his obligations
as a teacher seriously and it seems his students profited greatly. He made
them memorize thousands of lines of poetry in their own language; no other
professor would have dared to be so old-fashioned. If a student said something
exceptionally stupid in class (for example, from the repertoire of American
political naiveté), Brodsky would throw him out of the classroom.
His autodidacts’ passion allowed him to master English
passively while he was still in Russia; afterward, he quite rapidly acquired
the ability to use the language freely in speech and writing. His astonishing
deftness in the essays he composed in English and in his rhymed translations
of his own poems could only have been the result of truly titanic labor.
He considered Polish poetry the most interesting of contemporary European
poetries. In Leningrad it reached him only as fragments, but important
ones: from Norwid to Garczynski. His translations include some of my poems,
too. "When, already an exile, he translated my "Elegy for N.N.," it occurred
to me that that poem expressed his view of lyric poetry as preserved autobiography,
even if only one-tenth preserved. He understood poets' escaping into prose
as the result of pressure from the remaining nine-tenths. He read my Treatise
on Poetry in Russian, in Natalia Gorbanevskaia's splendid translation.
It was published in America in 1982 as Poeticheskii traktat by the Ann
Arbor publishing house Ardis, which specializes in Russian books.
He had a very strong feeling that he was a part of an estate which
was called "Russian language." Since in his opinion poetry is the highest
achievement of language, he was conscious of his responsibility. If one
were to draw an analogy with the Polish estate, our attachment to Krasicki,
Trembecki, Mickiewicz would be understandable. Young Poland, however, is
a blank spot (with the exception of Boleslaw Lesmian) in comparison with
what was happening in Russia at that time, and only the poets of the Skamander
group can rival the generation of the Russian Acmeists.
Is there anyone among them to whom one could become
as attached as to Mandelstam or Akhmatova? For me, that poet was Jarosfaw
Iwaszkiewicz, but the revolution in versification caused the immediate
dissipation of that canon.
He used to tell his students that they probably were not terribly familiar
with the Decalogue, but it was possible to learn, since there were only
seventeen: the Ten Commandments and the seven cardinal sins-taken together,
the foundation of our civilization. His Muse, the spirit of language, was,
he said, Christian, which explains the Old and New Testament themes in
his poetry.
Generosity was one of his traits. His friends always felt showered
with gifts. He was ready to help at any moment, to organize, to manage
things. But above all, to praise. His generosity is most apparent in his
conversation with Volkov about Akhmatova. What praise of her greatness,
her wisdom, her kindness, and the magnificence of her heart! For him, the
greatness of a poet was inseparable from the poet's greatness as a human
being. Perhaps I
am mistaken, but I am unaware of a single instance when he praised
a poet while admitting at the same time that he was just average as a
human being. It was enough, for example, that Robert Frost was great in
his poetry to justify not inquiring into his biography. This was consistent
with his conviction that aesthetics precedes ethics and is even its source.
The most profound thing he said about Akhmatova, and perhaps the most
profound words ever spoken about the so-called creative process in general,
is the assertion that she suffered greatly while writing her Requiem. Her
pain at the imprisonment of her son was genuine, but in writing about it
she sensed falsehood precisely because she had to shape her emotions into
form. And form makes use of an emotional situation for its own purposes,
parasitizing it, as it were.
He wanted to be useful. He came up with the idea of distributing throughout
America millions of copies of an anthology of American poetry by placing
it in hotels and motels alongside the Bible. He managed to found a Russian
Academy in Rome, modeled after the American Academy in that city. He was
conscious of Russian literature's ties with Italy (Gogol's Dead Souls was
written in Rome; the Eternal City is always present in his own poems and
in Mandelstam's poetry; he wrote about Venice, which he adored). He had no
intention of returning to Russia. It is appropriate, then, that his grave
will be in Venice, like Stravinsky's and Diaghilev’s.
I would like to extract some pedagogical profit from thinking about
Brodsky. Do we have an appreciation of our language such as he had for Russian?
That it is the Russians' greatest treasure, right after the icon? Do not
I myself rebel against the shushing and hissing sounds of Polish, and even
worse, those omnipresent prze and przy syllables, pronounced
"psheh" and "pshih"? And yet Polish is my fatherland, my home, and my glass
coffin. Whatever I have accomplished in it-only that will save me.
And do we, as he did, honor our predecessors? Or do we only sneer and
bite? And why is it that in the home of literature, whose strength was always
poetry, there is suddenly no niche for great poets? Mickiewicz, Slowacki,
Norwid are there-but where are the representatives of our century? Will
Gombrowicz, Schulz, Witkacy replace the pretty pleiad of the Skamander poets?
A comparative study of Brodsky's poetry and Polish poetry would have
to begin with the various laws governing the two languages. What about
a comparison of Lesmian's Russian poetry, of his Pesni premudroi Vasilissy
[Songs of Vasilissa the Wise Woman], with his Polish poetry? But their
past is different, their themes are, too, as is the cultural background
after 1918.
How far can a poem depart from its original mnemonic function? For
Brodsky, phonetics and semantics were inseparable. This is an obvious
matter for a Russian, for whom a poem, if it does not insinuate itself
into one's memory, is not a poem at all. Despite the Polish language's
different laws, one could still memorize the poems of Skamander, and this
is true also of Galczynski's verse.
A departure from metrical norms and from rhymes seems to coincide in
time with a vast revolution in the life of societies in the twentieth
century, which has something in common with an explosion of quantity.
If, as happens to an exaggerated degree in Poland, one were to take France
as a model of artistic currents, Paul Valery, the last poet writing metrical
verse, stands on the border beyond which the decline of the meaning of
poetry begins, until it disappears entirely from the literary marketplace.
Perhaps something similar, in different circumstances, is taking place in
other countries. The scattering of the phrase into words and fragments of
sentences testifies to the fact that poetry's centuries-old coexistence
with the verse of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid has come to an end. It was they
who defined meters for poets of various languages. Someone might like to
ponder the strange parallels between changes in school and in literature:
the revolution in versification coincides in time with high school curricula
which no longer include Latin.
Brodsky loved the English language, perhaps because in the face of
the revolution in versification English seems to have preserved a greater
muscularity, so to speak. For various reasons, which it would be possible
to enumerate, the end of the rhymed verse of the Victorian era was the
occasion for a new modulation of the phrase, and because rhyme in English
did not have the same significance that it had in Italian, for example (Shakespearean
iambic pentameter was "blank"), its disappearance was not a glaring departure
from the practice of earlier poets. Nevertheless, one is taken aback not
only by Brodsky's evaluation of Frost as probably the greatest American poet
of the twentieth century but also by his praise of Edward Arlington Robinson
(1869-1935), who is known as a name from a bygone era. Walt Whitman's utter
lack of influence, in Brodsky's poems and his essays, is also curious.
As is well known, the only elegy on the death of T. S. Eliot in 1965
was written in Russian, by Brodsky. Eliot was already in literary purgatory
at the time, which is the usual reaction to a period of peak fame. But
in Russia he had only just been discovered. Later, as Brodsky admits, he
was disenchanted with Four Quartets. In general, he considered the whole
current of modernism (in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of that term) as unhealthy
for the art of poetry.
He spoke of the politics of his century, employing concepts dating
from antiquity: imperium, tyrant, slave. In relation to art, however, he
was by no means a democrat. In the first place, he believed that poetry
in every society known to history is of interest to little more than one
percent of the population. Second, one cannot speak of equality among poets,
with the exception of the few who are the very best, to whom it is inappropriate
to apply the labels" greater" or "lesser." As egalitarian as could be in
his instincts, an opponent of any division into the intelligentsia and the
people, in relation to art he was as aristocratic as Nabokov and Gombrowicz.
Thinking about him constantly since his death, I try to name the lesson
he bequeathed to us. How did a man who did not complete his high school
education, who never studied at a university, become an authority recognized
by the luminaries of humanistic knowledge? He was intelligent, and not everyone
is granted that gift. But there was also something else that was decisive.
The Leningrad milieu of his generation, those a-Soviet young poets and
translators, devoured books. Their obsessive drive to read everything they
could find in libraries and used bookstores is stunning; they also learned
Polish, as Brodsky did, in order to read Western literature that was available
to them only in that language. The lesson supplied by his life history is
an optimistic one, because it points to the triumph of consciousness over
being. But it also cautions us to consider whether among the young generation
of Polish writers there exist groups with a similar drive for self-education.
"I permitted myself everything except complaints." This saying of Brodsky's
ought to be pondered by every young person who despairs and is thinking
about suicide. He accepted imprisonment philosophically, without anger;
he considered shoveling manure on a Soviet state farm a positive experience;
expelled from Russia, he decided to act as if nothing had changed; he equated
the Nobel Prize with the capricious turns of fate he had experienced previously.
The wise men of antiquity recommended such behavior, but there are not
many people who can behave like that in practice.
Czeslaw Milosz: To Begin Where I Am
* Reszty nie trzeba: Rozmowy z Josifem Brodskim, selected
and edited by Jerzy lllg (Kaatowice: Ksiaznica, 1993).
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