The great Brodsky

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The great Brodsky

Losev’s book lives up to its subtitle as “an essay in literary biography” by giving equal weight to Brodsky’s moral and literary profile, and five of the ten chapters offer an interlocking set of essays and poetic commentaries devoted to aesthetic and philosophical issues. Losev’s love and understanding of Brodsky’s poetry inform a literary criticism that is also as objective as possible about Brodsky’s immense accomplishments as a thinker and writer and his sometimes glaring shortcomings, especially in English. His intellectual independence emerges as one of Losev’s main themes. For all his attentiveness to Brodsky’s wit, he clearly places great emphasis on the notion of Brodsky’s sincerity and commitment to truth as fundamental tenets of his poetic art and moral posture. While Brodsky was capable of great irony, he associated it with evasiveness. Losev is convinced that Brodsky’s lyric “I” speaks for the man himself, achieving a fusion of lived experience and aesthetic identity that puts Brodsky in the tradition of the Romantics. Aware of the biographical fallacy, Losev is not a naive literalist, and the Romantic unity of life and work makes sense of poems where Brodsky explores changes in his own identity, brought about by exile or by emotional circumstance, and projects his personality through literary personae such as Odysseus or Byron. All the same, some readers may also detect more self-irony and witty self-mockery than Losev accommodates in this portrait.
Exploring Brodsky’s early affinities with existentialist writers such as Camus and Lev Shestov, Losev identifies what would be a theme in his poetry for decades: the opposition between aesthetic fullness that is realized in poetry, and emptiness, which took the form of various bleak images in his poems such as deserted rooms, deadened organic matter, disembodied light. How Brodsky came to develop an attitude to Fate is a related strand in Losev’s narrative. Part-Cicero, part-Camus and part Steve McQueen (an actor whom he admired, particularly for his performance in The Magnificent Seven), Brodsky was taught by life to brace himself for the accidents of circumstance beyond individual control, and found in art types of ordering and control that had an autonomous beauty. The interviews in Haven’s collection and Losev’s analysis in Iosif Brodsky make clear that for Brodsky the limitless intricacies of composition rather than the limited stock of subject matter (death, love, parting) were the true expression of creative genius because they captured the movements of the soul. For this reason he adored the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, whose heartbreaking emotionality fuelled extraordinary feats of linguistic innovation; yet he was equally drawn to the less histrionic Auden, in whom he admired a differently voiced commitment to ethics. As a poet who wrote about sin and forgiveness, Auden also strengthened Brodsky’s attraction to aspects of Christianity. Losev is particularly illuminating on the numerous poems, including the seminal lyric “Anno Domini”, which treat values that Brodsky identified as specifically Christian. That said, Brodsky never thought of himself as other than a Jew – his Soviet passport would have recorded his nationality as Jewish – and Losev takes him to be a polytheist by nature.
At the end of his life, Brodsky was an American citizen, the country’s first foreign-born Poet Laureate, a powerful and acclaimed essayist, and an English-language poet. He earned the admiration of many other poets, but also provoked hostile reactions from respected critics, including Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, who attacked Brodsky’s verbosity and specious logic, and somehow smelt a fraud. It is certainly the case that Brodsky’s legacy in English is important – he remains an admired essayist – but it is also highly uneven, with eloquence and common sense doing battle with sporadic fits of fuzzy thinking, garbled syntax and pseudophilosophical pronouncements. Always a creative critic, Brodsky was at his exhilarating best when examining individual poems. But he was less persuasive when expatiating on cultural politics, and he misjudged sensitivities in his public statements about race and religion, further irritating some readers. Losev does not flinch from an even-handed discussion of the charges. A poet of philosophical depth (if no philosopher), Brodsky had a penchant for syllogisms and propositions over which he sometimes seemed to lose control. As Losev sympathetically suggests, some of this opaqueness stemmed from the haphazard nature of his education. But temperament and conviction also played a part. Brodsky found in language a solution to his horror vacui. The more substantial the verbal structures he created in describing absence and nothingness, the greater his psychological sense of mastery. When restricted to smaller lyric forms, Brodsky in Russian was inventive and musical, emotionally direct (sometimes brutal) and memorably aphoristic. His last poems are the equal of his earliest for their eloquence and capacity to move. Genuine problems arise, however, for readers who depend on English translations.
Daniel Weissbort’s searching chronicle of his own experiences in rendering Brodsky’s poems, From Russian with Love: Joseph Brodsky in English (2004), is worth reading for its views on Brodsky and on translation more generally. Yet despite the benefit that Brodsky had of working with distinguished poet-translators, the worst traitor among translators was Brodsky himself. While he proved to be a stern taskmaster regarding others – examples of his capacity for gracious collaboration and intimidation crop up in Weissbort’s gripping memoir-cum-study – his own versions are extensive and badly distorted rewritings. It is often the case that the closer he thought he came to the original, the more distorted the English idiom sounds. In part, the results reflect Brodsky’s enthusiastic ambition to make English work as Russian does; and in part they capture his tone-deafness to the intonational patterns of English verse. Anyone who has heard recordings of Brodsky reading English poetry will wonder about the exaggerated style in which he hammers out rhythm. Time will tell whether Losev’s discussion of Brodsky’s work as translator and essayist will provoke a critical reconsideration by Brodsky’s detractors. The publication of this well-researched, moderate and thoughtful book by a distinguished poet with an impeccable knowledge of Russian literature is a major event. A translation of Losev’s book into English would do a great deal to reveal to the larger public the true quality of Brodsky’s genius and to explain his stature as a major poet.

AuthorAndrew Kahn
2018-08-21T17:23:07+00:00 August 3rd, 2007|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 55|0 Comments