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Thoughts from Christmas past Joseph Brodsky's annual reflections on the Nativity collected in one volume Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, December 23, 2001
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Nativity Poems By Joseph Brodsky FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 113 PAGES; $16Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky's "Nativity Poems" are an extended meditation on a lifelong theme. They were composed more or less annually from 1962 to 1995 -- pretty much the entire period of his oeuvre -- and scattered in the pages of the most prestigious publications (the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Paris Review, Threepenny Review among them). They have been united at last into a single volume for this Christmas season. Why the Nativity? Czeslaw Milosz, a fellow Nobel laureate and friend, cites them as an example of the poet's "piety," a word not to be taken strictly in a religious sense, but rather to signify a respect for the past, for certain crucial points in our history. In an undated interview appended to this book, Brodsky describes the poems as "a sort of birthday greeting." The phrase may not be as offhand as it seems; it obliquely calls to mind Marina Tsvetaeva's landmark poem, "New Year's Greetings," on the death of her friend and correspondent, Rainer Maria Rilke, also the subject of an important Brodsky essay. Brodsky, however, jettisons Tsvetaeva's ecstatic tone when speaking of heavenly matters, aiming instead for a cool, classical monotone and a neutral meter. He nevertheless hits a good many high notes of his own, which ring true even when transposed into a difficult English key: . . . God has lighted in the blue immense the planets, icon lamps to glow before the face we cannot know.
. . . and you half wish to clench your eyes, or step into a different galaxy, in whose wastes there shine more lights than there are sands in Palestine. . Brodsky's been dead for nearly six years. But the books keep coming (his "Collected Poems" in English was released last spring). Only a fraction of his poetry has been translated into English, for Brodsky's facility and output were as miraculous as his prosodic pyrotechnics. He is perhaps the most determinedly unsentimental poet in Russian literature. That has spared him the fate of other Russian poets in translation -- Tsvetaeva, again, provides a distressing case in point. Her poetry can sound shrill and hysterical in English, with the language's notorious incapacity for holding emotion. Like his mentor W.H. Auden, Brodsky approaches emotion indirectly, by understatement -- a break for his English translators. His metaphors and tropes, the endless somersaults of his mind, are breathtaking ("so much light's packed into one star-shard/ it's like refugees packed into one boat"; these, too, survive translation. What gets lost is the inventiveness of his forms and the musicality of his meter, the very poetry itself. The facing pages of Russian text here reveal much, most tragically, in Brodsky's own translations. Brodsky meticulously replicated inflection, rhyme schemes and meter for an audience that has grown metrically tone-deaf over the last century; alas, his Western audience has instead become allergic to any artifice and unnaturalness in language, to which Brodsky, in turn, was tone- deaf in English. He builds his English sentences the Russian way, juggling word order with a flotilla of commas. But his insistence on being technically true to the original bespeaks an extraordinary poetic integrity. The crop of translators in "Nativity Poems" includes heavy hitters -- two Nobel laureates and two Pulitzer Prize winners among them. Ten of the 18 poems are new translations. Richard Wilbur is, as always, unparalleled. He comes closest to re-creating the music of Brodsky's rhyme and meter. Moreover, he mirrors the peculiarities of Brodsky's idiom with precision by means of English equivalences. Brodsky once said that if he were an American poet, he thought he'd be Wilbur; the affinity is apparent in these pages. A surprising home run is scored by British poet Glyn Maxwell, a former student of Derek Walcott's, who translates "Speech for Spilled Milk," which covers about a quarter of the book. He meets Brodsky's demands for musicality and meaning, while nailing the Russian's flat, ironic tone. (" 'There is no God. The earth's a mess.' "/ " 'Too right. I'll take up chicks, I guess.' " ) Others are a mixed bag. Paul Muldoon's translation is watery, wordy. Even Seamus Heaney often misses the point, as well as the form ("And as to the desert -- the desert is everywhere" becomes "And to feel the desert -- but the desert is everywhere"). He remains stolidly Heaney-like where he needs to morph into the quicksilver Russian. In the end, we are left with nagging frustration as well as pleasure. It seems poignantly apparent that we will have to learn Russian to catch the heady magic that knocks Russians off their feet; it eludes the most polished translations. The second frustration: This is a poet, and a mind, not likely to be matched in our lifetime. "Nativity Poems" is a slim volume, almost paperback size, a thoughtful stocking-stuffer during this troubling holiday season. Cynthia Haven reviews poetry for Book Review. She has contributed most recently to the Cortland Review. |
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