SOMETHINGLIKE HIS OWN LANGUAGE

The Collected Poems in English. Joseph Brodsky.

Farrar, Strauss andGiroux.New York: 2001

Daniel Weissbort

Thetitle of this hefty book is challenging, rather than, as at first sight itseems, simply factual.  It is notimmediately apparent that the volume contains several categories of “Poems inEnglish”.  First, poems translated by theauthor from his own Russian into his own English; second, poems translated bythe author in collaboration with another translator; third, poems independently(presumably) translated by other translators; fourth, poems written by theauthor in English.  Increasingly,Brodsky, if with reluctance, was taking charge of the translation process, as Inoted in a review of So Forth (1996)(“His own Translator: Joseph Brodsky”, Translation& Literature, Vol. 7, Part 1, 1998). When he worked through or alongside another translator, he exertedstrict control, which sometimes led to tense situations.  Whether his auto-translations were muchinfluenced by feedback from others is not known to me, but it is unlikely thatthey were entirely free of such influences.

      Translators’ names are not to be foundunder each poem.  Consequently it is notimmediately apparent whether the poem was written in English rather thantranslated into it.  Many of the poemsare translations in the traditional sense. The collaborations in varyingdegrees, and, to a greater extent, the self-translations are also translations,but in a special sense, which I shall attempt to characterize.  In fact, the authorial status of these poemsis indicated, and additional information provided at the back of thevolume.  In a brief “Editor’s Note”, Ann Kjellberg, Brodsky’s former assistant, now his literaryexecutor, explains that the volume contains “all the poems by Joseph Brodskythat appeared in book form in English under his supervision during the author’slifetime, in their last known versions, as well as several poems he wasenthusiastic about but unable to accommodate in his books.”  This accounts for approximately a third ofhis oeuvre, but does not include the first collection,Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems(Penguin 1973) translated by George Kline. Professor Kline, it should be said, also often worked closely with theauthor and has written in detail about these collaborations [e.g. “RevisingBrodsky”, Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, ed. Weissbort,1989).  Evidently a new expanded versionof the Selected Poems is due, as is afurther collection of poems, not supervised by the author.  Ms. Kjellbergpoints out that in identifying the translators and collaborators in the notesrather than in the body of the text, “we are following the author’s decision,in So Forth [his last collection,published posthumously], to acknowledge translators separately from the poems,which we understood as an invitation to the reader to consider the poems as ifthey were original texts in English […]”. She was concerned – quite understandably – that these translations,either by Brodsky or supervised by him, should get a hearing first.  The volume is not only of importance,containing a sizeable proportion of the work of one of the greatest Russianpoets of our time or any time, but also, I think, something of a landmarkvolume in the history of poetry translation inEnglish.  By not highlighting thetranslators’ names, Brodsky was not seeking to denigrate their role, but ratherto raise the status of translation itself, as it were. (This of course, is nogreat comfort to individual translators!) He was also, characteristically, putting himself in the firing line, bydisplaying himself in (often problemtical)English.  There were two Brodskys, but even if the Russian one was immeasurablygreater, the English one was and is a force in its own right. 

      Brodsky’s translation criteria were, tosay the least, not the prevailing ones. He insisted religiously on retention of the form (rhyme and especially metre).  To manytranslators this seemed a simplistic, even naïve approach, and he was taken to taskby, among others, Yves Bonnefoy, W.S. Merwin, and Donald Davie. I tended towards this view myself and it still seems to me somewhatsurprising that there were also those who defended his use of English,particularly in the States: Peter Viereck, MarkStrand, Derek Walcott, for instance. Brodsky was not always the most tactful or diplomatic of men, althoughhe was a man of great kindness and compassion; he was also a man of formidableintelligence.  But he was impatient,literally not having much time at his disposal, since he could not expect tohave a long life, and certainly not enough time to soothe the wounded egos ofthose who worked with him on his translations. He was 55 at the time of his death. 

      It has to be said that Brodsky did notexplain himself sufficiently either, though he gave innumerable interviews andreadings and wrote superb essays.   Hehardly addressed the question of his own work in English, beyond a few remarkshere and there (see V. Polukhina, “Brodsky’s Views onTranslation”, Modern Poetry inTranslation 10, Winter 1996), in his interviews for instance, and attemptsin his reviews (notoriously, in his politically ill-considered assault on the Merwin/Brown translations of Mandelstam [New York Review of Books, Feb 17, 1974)to assert the primacy of form.  Ingeneral, he asserted rather than argued and had little inclination to put theseassertions into a historical or translational perspective, let alone give dueconsideration to the counter-arguments. Well, all the more work for the Brodskyists,of whom there is an increasing number: I personally know of severalinvestigating his work as a translator into and out of Russian.

      When Brodsky died, I began a kind ofjournal (From Russian with Love,Anvil 2002). in which I continued, as it were, variousconversations I had had with him about translation and other matters.  In particular I looked at one of his birthdaypoems to himself, “May 24, 1980”, which opened thecollection To Urania(1988).  This poem was alludedto several times by Craig Raine in an iconoclasticreview of So Forth and On Grief and Reason: Essays (Financial Times, 16, 17 November1996).  The same poem had been criticised (somewhat less vitriolically)by Christopher Reid in a Review of To Urania.  Raine apparently detests Brodsky’s essays as much as hedoes his poems in English, which he accuses of “ineptness," “garrulouslack of clarity”, “prodigal padding”, etc. “As a thinker”, he adds, “Brodsky is fatuous and banal”, “as a critic[he is] barely competent” (this of a man whose lectures on poetry inspired twoor three generations of his students in America).  But potentially even more damaging is Raine’s contention that Brodsky simply had no “ear” forEnglish. “Good knockabout fun”, Lachlan Mackinnon comments, in a brief exchangeof letter in the TLS, following Mackinon’s review of the Collected Poems in English (“A break from dullness: the virtues ofBrodsky’s English verse”, TLS, June 22 2001).“Good knockabout fun” about describes Raine’s FT piece as well.  But of course it is meant seriously.  In the end Rainefalls back on his ear!  “With Brodsky, itis all a question of ear”, he concludes triumphantly.

      A more substantial critique is by the lateDonald Davie, in a review of To Urania (“The saturated line”, TLS, Dec 25-9, 1988).  Davie does accept thatBrodsky is a “greatly gifted poet, very serious about his vocation”, but hewarns that: “We have made of him a monument and an icon...”  Davie’s main pointis that Brodsky overloads his verse, whether writing in English or translatinginto it: “[His] heaping of trope on trope, a hyperactivity of metaphors seemsto have come into being not by design, but somewhere in the gulf betweenRussian and English.”  Familiar with Russianas a translator [Pasternak], Davie argues plausibly insupport of this contention.  Forinstance, the strong accent has as consequence that “the pounding Russian linecan master and carry along with itself a clutter of exuberant tropes and‘physical detail’, under the weight of which the lighter English line stumblesand hesitates and is snarled.”  Yes, butI would suggest that the implied negative conclusion is not necessarily thelast word on this subject.  Brodsky wasnot unaware of the problem, but he still tried to overcome it.  I think the question is at the very least anopen one, although there is not the room to argue this here, since it wouldrequire a line by line analysis of several poems.

      Davie also refers to Brodsky’s habit ofenjambment in Russian, not directly transferable into English, “precisely”, hecontends, “because it is potentially more disruptive”, since “our [English]rhythms are far more wavering and variable […]” Not only does Brodsky attempt to affect this transfer into English, buthe enjambs non-semantically in his own Englishverse.  With regard to “Belfast Tune”,for instance, Davie maintains that “in none of these cases (of enjambment) doesthe whirl across the line-end, with the consequent jar or thud at the firstpause in the next line, mirror a corresponding violence in feeling, in what issaid.  Accordingly, the verse-lines havea metrical and typographic but not a musicalintegrity.”  It seems to me that it isprecisely a musical integrity that they do possess, although the music is not afamiliar one.  (I would refer readers toan excellent essay on this poem by Robert Reid, in Lev Loseffand Valentina Polukhina,Eds. Joseph Brodsky, The Art of a Poem,which contains also analyses of a number of poems written by Brodsky inEnglish; in the same volume is. Polukhina’s exhaustive essay on “May 24, 1980”.)  But Brodsky’s use of emjambementhas distressed even sympathetic readers of his English poetry, like SeamusHeaney, whose poem in memory of Joseph, “Audenesque”,contains the following lines: “Jammed enjambementspiling up / As you went above the top.” 

      In this connection, the counterweight ofrhyme is extraordinarily helpful. Accordingly, Brodsky seeks to enrich the English rhyme stock, especiallywith regard to feminine rhymes.  In theprocess he makes numerous discoveries and, it has to be said, not a few timesfalls flat on his face.  The point is,though, that he dares, in spite ofall the objections and in spite of being endlessly lectured to on the dangersof polysyllabic rhyming in English. Incidentally Heaney, in his witty and affectionate poem-tribute, deploysa very Brodskyan rhyme, viz.“Pepper vodka you produced / Once inWestern Massachusetts” (pronounced “choosts”).  Just asone hears this in Heaney’s pronuncition,one also hears Brodsky’s, a curious blend of American, Russian and ratherold-fashioned British English.  I am surethat American English encouraged Brodsky in his exploitation of the rhymingpotential of our common language.   

      I have suggested elsewhere that ratherthan being part of an embattled minority, heroically defending good English, Raine was rather a “member of the chorus”.  And I have quoted Michael Hofmann in hisreview of Brodsky’s last poems and essays (TLS,January  10,1997).  I should like to quote him again,since he begins to get to the root of the matter, the negative attitude toBrodsky, which has more to do with cultural history than with “ear”: “Brodskyisn’t an empirical English type of poet. Perhaps that’s why Christopher Reid and, following him, Craig Raine, didn’t get on with him.  His metaphors tend not to be visuallyaccurate – or visually exhaustible. Unlikeness and exaggeration are more important to the image thanresemblance and plausibility, […] Martianismaffects to enrich the world adding a clever self to whatever’s in view.  Brodsky does the opposite: he subtractshimself.”  What Craig Raine,in the birthday poem referred to above, calls “self-heroising”,Hofmann sees as “part of the ‘tall’,clownish idiom...– the stoic’s refusal to flinch or blink, or so much as to dignify theaffliction with its proper, emotive name...” 

      If I seem to be engaging in a kind ofpolemic with Raine, this is only because his remarkstypify, in a way, the English response to Brodsky’s incursions into thelanguage.  For instance, Raine is scornful of Brodsky’s apology for revisingtranslations by others in an effort to bring them “closer to the original,though perhaps at the expense of smoothness”. He fails to see that this proves his point, only if one equates smoothnesswith excellence.  In fact, to produce atext which seems to have been written in English, which in that sense “readssmoothly”, is no longer the sine qua non of good translation.  At this time, there appears to be moreinterest in somehow capturing the foreignness of the foreign.  Of course, it is all a matter of judgment,and of course the extent to which change can be tolerated itself changes.  It is quite likely that many of Brodsky’slinguistic moves, to which Raine and others object,will be less rebarbative to the average reader in thenot so distant future. 

      Not that Brodsky was necessarily concernedwith such theoretical matters.  What he was concerned with was conveying, asdirectly as possible, aspects of his Russian text (one might also say aspectsof Russian itself) in English.  In sodoing, even if he may often have gone too far for our present discriminations,he did pioneer certain approaches that are probably worth exploring further andprobably will be explored.  What he wasafter was no less than a translation of the poem as a physical, a livingentity, its feel, shape, movement.  Hisprocedure was literalistic.  But,somewhat paradoxically, he was also prepared to do a fair amount of rewriting,although what he was rewriting was his own poetry.  That his mastery of English was sometimesinadequate to the task is hardly surprising. But he had to have a go, since it was asking too much of his translatorsto expect them to, as it were, violate the norms of English.  Some were more willing than others to try,but I do not think that any fully appreciated what he was up to.  I certainly didn’t.  Peter France, though, who translated the“Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots” (see “Notes on the Sonnets to MaryQueen of Scots”, Brodsky’s Poetics &Aesthetics, Eds. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina,  1990) had more ofan inkling than most.  The originalFrance version is to be found in this book, but Brodsky later revised it, in anattempt, as France reported with admirable equanimity (see “TranslatingBrodsky”, Modern Poetry in Translation,No. 10, Winter 1996) to remedy “an almost chronic metric arhythmia”and to strengthen the rhyming.  Withregard to Sonnet 5, radically revised by Brodsky, France comments: “[I]n thissonnet, using his freedom as original author, Brodsky goes way beyond the rhymescheme of the Russian text.  Even so, histranslation––raraavis as it is––might inspire reticentEnglish-language translators to a greater formal daring.” 

      What is surprising, perhaps, is how oftenBrodsky’s competence was sufficient or how often he was able to fashion aself-consistent, if non-standard English text to match the Russianoriginal.  This highly intellectual poetwas also working at a level almost of pure sound and movement.  I was made more keenly aware of this when Itried, experimentally, to “correct” one or two of his self-translations.  Since his command of English grammar andidiom was not always what one would have wished, I wondered if it might not bepossible discreetly to “fix” his versions. I discovered that they couldn’t be altered without seriously damagingthe sound structure.  It is arguable thatfar from not having an “ear” in English, Brodsky, in fact, had too muchear!  Too much, atleast, for his own good, or for the good of his reputation.  But then, as I’ve suggested, he didn’t havetime to answer the predictable objections, nor to make his meaning clear, whichwould have necessitated committing himself fully to the debate.

      I have written and tried to demonstrate elsewherehow Brodsky appeared to be working betweenEnglish and Russian.  As earlier on hehad, in a sense, Anglicised Russian, by translatinginto his native language the poetry of the English Metaphysicals,especially Donne, bringing into Russian poetry a rationality, logic that as arule it lacked––Baratynsky, Pushkin’scontemporary, and a favourite of Brodsky’s, was alone exception, as Pushkin himself acknowledged––, sohe Russianised English when translating his ownRussian poems into his adopted language. Questioned about his co-translation with Brodsky of “Letters from theMing Dynasty”, Derek Walcott (see “A Merciless Judge”, Brodsky through the eyes of his Contemporaries, Ed. Valentina Polukhina, 1992) said:“Joseph’s poetry has enriched English twentieth-century poetry because mostpoets in the twentieth century that I can think of don’t see intelligence asbeing a quality of poetry.  I think oneof the things I learned from Joseph is that thinking was part of poetry.”  It has to said that Russian, if one maypersonify it, welcomed the process far more than did English, perhaps becauserelatively recently the Russian language had, in any case, been subjected to Germanisation as well as Frenchification.  The bringing of Russian into English, on theother hand, was greeted by howls of dismay and indignation.  But English, for better or worse, being theworld language, is less and less exposed to other languages: translation intoEnglish, as against translation into other languages, is quite limited.  Arguably Brodsky was a remedial poet forEnglish in the twenty-first century. 

      However, it is a little more complicatedeven than that.  Devotedas he was to English and to the English literary tradition, Brodsky, as I havejust noted, to a certain extent Anglicised Russian.  When these already AnglicisedRussian poems are translated back, as it were, into English, what we have,perhaps, is a symbiosis of two languages and literary cultures.  

      Ann Kjellbergconcludes her “Editor’s Note”: “Although Brodsky remained a Russian poet first,his unique relationship to his adoptive language, filled with vigour and affection, brought forth a body of work restingsomewhere between translation and original creation, internally coherent, richin linguistic and prosodic invention, and quickened by the spirit that had madehim a great poet in his native Russian. If as Brodsky wrote, a writer’s biography is in his twists of language,an important chapter of his own story resides in these poems, exactinglyrendered into his beloved second tongue.” This about sums it up.  It is hard, perhaps impossible, to addanything without quoting chapter and verse, but were I to attempt this, thepresent piece would turn into a small book: three or four examples would notsuffice.

      So, to conclude.  In the translations done or supervised byhim, Brodsky, it seems to me, attempts to resurrect his Russian poems bodily. He tries to reproduce the structure of the original, its weight, and thephysical place it makes for itself.  Ofcourse there is more that could be said on the subject, but, although suchbodily translation remains a dream, most translators eventually settle forcompromise, taking advantage of opportunities to compensate for the inevitablelosses.  The benefits that accrue toindividual poet/translators and, more important, to the language itself are orcan be momentous, but there appears to be no such thing as absolutetranslation.  Brodsky, of course, knew thistoo, but so drastic were the losses when translating from Russian into Englishthat he was compelled, given his situation and for even more existentialreasons, to attempt to redress the balance. As usual, he went for broke.  Sven Birkets ends his review of the Collected Poems in English (New York Times Book Review, 17 Sept,2000): “Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled hisperceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked tohold.”  

      Like many others I had a problem with theresults. Often Brodsky seemed to be ignoring idiomatic usage, eitherunwittingly or because adhering to it would make his task utterlyimpossible.  The Russian tonalities hetried to assimilate into English resulted sometimes in the ugliness that Raine complains of. To quote in full his author’s note to A Part of Speech (1980): “I have taken the liberty of reworkingsome of the translations to bring them closer to the original, though perhapsat the expense of their smoothness. I am doubly grateful to the translators fortheir indulgence.”  I was one translatorwho did not willingly indulge him, and I was convinced that his radicalintervention was a fatal error.  DonaldDavie thought so too, as did Christopher Reid later.  The problem is complicated by the fact thatBrodsky’s early reputation in English was boosted not only by Anna Akhmatova’s imprimatur and W.H. Auden’spreface to the first collection (in George Kline’s translation, published inthe year of Auden’s death, 1973), but also by thefact that some of his poems were translated by such virtuosi as Richard Wilbur,Anthony Hecht and Howard Moss.  Theresulting English pieces were eminently acceptable as American poems.  But, as Peter Porter put it, in a review of To Urania:“In...A Part of Speech, Brodskyworked with a number of American poets who are natural dandies... This gave thevolume an Ivy League slickness which was plainly wrong...”  I don’t know about “Ivy League slickness”,but clearly Brodsky, flattered though he may have been, was after somethingelse.  While he might be able to workmore closely with his friend Derek Walcott, he presumably had little directcontrol over Wilbur or Hecht.  He did,though, over such lesser luminaries like Alan Myers or myself.  In a letter to me, Myers  remarked: “My own versions were too smooth,light and regular (‘cute’) for his taste, and often prompted him to set aboutactually re-writing his verse, working back from a bolder, more jaggedly energeticEnglish rhyme.  The line-length, (my)rhythm, even the meaning might all undergochange.  Indeed, on one occasion, he wentso far as to say that everything should be sacrificed to the rhyme!  For a sharp increase in energy level,‘smoothness’ was well lost.”  Theconclusion drawn by some commentators was that Brodsky’s approach wassimplistic: poetry equals rhyme and metre, which,then, must be preserved at all costs in the translation.  And this, notwithstanding the fact that, forinstance, Russian as an inflected language had many more rhymes, includingfeminine ones, resulting from its polysyllabic nature, as against monosyllabicEnglish.  And notwithstanding that theRussian poetic tradition is at least two hundred years younger than theEnglish.  The contrast, say, betweenWilbur’s Brodsky and Brodsky’s own was, for many, simply too much.

      As a reader of poetry in translation andas a poetry translator myself, what I often found far more interesting thanformal translations, however skilful, were more or less ad-verbumversions.  Brodsky, although he sometimesseemed to be demanding formally mimetic translation, was after somethingmore.  In his way, he, too, was a kind ofliteralist, and his own versions of his poems are as semantically literal as hecould make them, while also being more literal formally than English couldoften manage.  But they do, I believe,create audible links between the two languages, and only time will tell whataffect they have had on English poetry and on English usage itself.  So, the volume, just published here by FarrarStraus, may be a kind of time bomb.  Butit also provides a rare opportunity for non-Russian speakers to read one of thegreatest Russian poets in something like his ownlanguage.