I've been reading a bit of Joseph Brodsky, who I admire but find much less accessible than some of the other Russian poets with whom he tends to be linked. Maybe someone who reads Russian can comment on him - for me, he is powerful, provocative, and deliberately rough, refusing, perhaps, to yield to the lyricism his mentors' poetry retains even in translation.
I've been thinking about the first poem in his anthology Toward Urania. The poem's title is May 24, 1980. It begins (in Brodsky's own translation):
I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrive let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
The poem goes on as he describes places he's been, the "stale and warty" bread he ate in exile. And suddenly he states that he is forty, and the poem concludes:
What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
On the back of this volume, which I hope to be exploring more, is a quote from a review by Czeslaw Milosz in The New York Review of Books:
"It is poetry at two poles of human existence: love as it is lived and suffered through, and death almost tasted and feared...As a defense against despair, we have the oeuvre of a man wholly concentrated on his poetry."
Yes, this is powerful, provocative and rough as life itself. His translation is good, isn't it, so his English is excellent? Often works of writers like Goethe and Rilke suffer in translation.
Posted by: Marja-Leena | October 17, 2005 at 03:51 PM
I have no Russian, but theses folks might be able to give you some feedback.
http://www.languagehat.com/
Posted by: zhoen | October 17, 2005 at 04:41 PM
Brodsky...
What can I say? I don't want to come off like one of those snobs who go around saying you have to read everything in the original, and I don't want to put you off enjoying the translations. All I can do is tell you my experience, and give a few pointers regarding this poem/translation.
For many years I was like you: I admired him but found him less accessible than other Russian poets. I broke my mental teeth over his complicated imagery and strange word choices (in English); I had some reading ability in Russian, enough to appreciate a relatively simple (on the surface) poet like Pushkin, but not nearly enough for Brodsky, where I had to look up so many words I forgot what the poem was about. I basically took him on faith (though I eagerly got him to sign my copy of A Part of Speech when he was in NYC for a reading). Then I fell for a Russian woman and my language ability magically improved, and soon I was reading far more difficult texts than I'd been able to get my brain around before -- and since the gal in question was a poetry-lover from Petersburg and a huge fan of Mandelshtam and Brodsky, I dove into those and found myself quickly at home. With Mandelshtam it was more a deepening of appreciation, since he's more approachable in translation; with Brodsky it was like turning on the light switch. Suddenly the lines read smoothly, the wit was ravishing, the poems shone with undeniable greatness. I went back to the translations, and they seemed... well, not very good. Here I think the author's involvement was to their detriment; Brodsky's English was excellent, but it's almost impossible to write poetry in a language you didn't grow up with, and it seems to me he's constantly straining for effect, pulling dramatic but not-quite-right words out of his hat for the sake of an rhyme, even adding completely extraneous material to the poem. Let's look at this one (which in Russian doesn't have a title).
First, the rhymes. In Russian poetry rhyme is basic -- there was never a free-verse revolution as there was in English. (There was free verse written, of course, but it never became the mainstream or anything close to it.) The rhymes in this poem are (typically for Brodsky) either exact rhymes (as in the first four lines: kletku - barake - ruletku - frake) or close off-rhymes (polmira - vskormila, gunna - gumna). The English "rhymes" are typically much looser (rafters - truffles, saddles - stables), which would be fine if they were part of a consistent pattern and if the poet knew intimately what he was doing, and here I just don't get that feeling. Worse, the two exact rhymes (gritty - city, warty - forty) are forced into being by adding stuff that isn't in the original: the "nitty-gritty" line is in Russian "trizhdy tonl, dvzhdy byvl rasprot" 'three times I sank/drowned, twice I was ripped open' [literally 'unstitched'], and the "warty" line is "zhral khleb izgnnya, ne ostavlyya krok" 'I ate the bread of exile, not leaving (any) crusts.' Not only did "nitty-gritty" and "warty" come out of nowhere, they don't seem to me to make any sense (warty bread?) or to contribute anything except a rhyme, and we all know what they say about words tossed in for the sake of a rhyme without reason.
And in general he muddies the waters for the sake of flashy diction. The third line in Russian is "zhil u mrya, igrl v ruletku" 'I lived by the sea, played roulette'; why on earth "flashed aces in an oasis"? And the third line from the end is completely rewritten, from "Tl'ko s grem ya chvstvuyu solidrnost'" 'only with grief do I feel solidarity' to "Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit" -- to which my response is Yuck! I understand that poets often want to revisit their earlier work and polish (or unpolish) it according to their later standards, but this is almost always a mistake (Auden, Marianne Moore), and doubly so here, where the poet is operating in a foreign tongue.
Don't get me wrong. Brodsky was a great poet, and the greatness shines through these translations; I just think they're not nearly as good as they could be, in part (ironically) because of the author's involvement. Perhaps one day someone else will come along, start from scratch (ignoring his revered predecessor's curlicues and add-ons), and produce translations that make Brodsky's greatness as apparent in English as in the original.
Or almost as apparent. We can't ask for miracles.
Posted by: language hat | October 18, 2005 at 02:47 PM
LH - thank you so much! Last night I plowed (literally, it felt) further into the volume. The previous night I had read his "Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots" which I found absolutely brilliant, but there and in other works I kept comign up against this awkwardness, the insistence on rhyme, strange word choices - even though I didn't know what the Russian was I could sometimes ask, "gee, why didn't he use "x" instead?" And I began to wonder if maybe it was a problem with his insistence on doing his own translations - which you seem to have confirmed. One of the worst was "The fifth Anniversary" which I found almost unreadable. On the other hand, in a poem like "Lithuanian Nocturne" you get lines like "Folk are scuffling from churches protecting the commas/of their candle flames in trembling brackets of hands" - which is just beautiful - but the lyricism and smoothness come and go in that one.
Then last night I read "Lines on the Winter Campaign" - another brilliant poem - and it flowed along through all seven parts - and at the end, guess what? "Translated by Alan Myers".
Thanks again for your comments - I was hoping you'd stop by and talk Russian poets with me!
Posted by: beth | October 18, 2005 at 03:28 PM
Always a pleasure!
Posted by: language hat | October 19, 2005 at 10:45 AM
Having only ever read - or tried to read - his original poetry in English, I was never quite sure what the fuss was all about. I'm glad to hear he's a great poet in Russian. Maybe someday he'll be retranslated by someone else the way Tagore has been.
Posted by: Dave | October 19, 2005 at 03:38 PM
This looks like an interesting book: From Russian with Love: Joseph Brodsky in English, by Daniel Weissbort
http://cbsd.com/detail.aspx?Inventory=16115
Posted by: language hat | October 23, 2005 at 04:46 PM