I traveled north several hours to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving last week, and home again three days later. Through rural areas mostly, my favorite views were of the forests and orchards, oaks and maples and almonds, many of the trees with their leaves glowing yellow and red as the light caught them just right, against a dark green conifer background. The sun was, as this poem says, the artist.
THE SUN
All colors come from the sun. And it does not have Any particular color, for it contains them all. And the whole Earth is like a poem While the sun above represents the artist.
Whoever wants to paint the variegated world Let him never look straight up at the sun Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen. Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.
Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass, And look at the light reflected by the ground. There he will find everything we have lost: The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.
When I am reading any sort of literature I often think of what fellow blogger M.K. has said, (forgive me, M.K., if I am distorting this) that when she finds someone whose writer’s voice she particularly appreciates, it doesn’t matter the topic of the writing, she enjoys reading everything he or she produces.
For me, the poet Joseph Brodsky is one of those writers. His intellect, his experience, his abilities, are so far removed from my own, it seems strange that I would feel the connection with him that I do. The attraction is there, but my time is limited, so I’ve actually read very little of his work. But this particular book, Less than One, got my attention recently, calling out from the mobile bookshelf that sits along the short path I often traverse, from the kitchen to the computer. I took it in hand and saw that it is a book of essays, but I didn’t remember why I had bought it.
Maybe it was after reading something like this, from the publisher:
This collection of essays thrusts Joseph Brodsky—previously known more for his poetry and translations—into the forefront of the “Third Wave” of Russian émigré writers. Originally published the year before Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Less Than One includes intimate literary essays and autobiographical pieces that evoke the daily discomfort of living under tyranny. His insights into the works of Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov, as well as the non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant; Seamus Heaney said of Brodsky’s treatment of one of Auden’s most famous poems, “There will be no greater paean to poetry as the breath and finer spirit of all human knowledge than Brodsky’s line-by-line commentary on ‘September 1, 1939.’”
Joseph Brodsky
That paragraph also made me interested to delve into Auden. But the first thing I read about the poem Heaney references, “September 1, 1939,” gave me pause. It was a blog post by Dr. Oliver Tearle, in which he points out that Auden disowned the poem and was “ashamed to have written” it.
When Brodsky was made unwelcome in the Soviet Union in 1972, W.H. Auden was one of the people who helped him to settle in the U.S. But long before that, as a young student, he was learning Polish and English with the goal of being able to translate poets like Czeslaw Milosz and John Donne. He said of his Jewish parentage, “While I am related to the Old Testament perhaps by ancestry, and certainly the spirit of justice, I consider myself a Christian. Not a good one but I try to be.”
When he was denounced and stood trial before a judge, the examination went like this:
Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet? Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study it?…How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an institute of higher learning…where they prepare…teach… Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education. Judge: By what then? Brodsky: I think that it is from God.
I immediately thought of Milosz and in particular his book The Captive Mind, when I read this paragraph from Brodsky, quoted on The Poetry Foundation website:
“Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite. … The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.”
No doubt one aspect of the poet’s voice I find compelling is this unwillingness to be captivated by things lesser than the infinite — anything less than the full expression of the human soul.
Czeslaw Milosz became an admirer, writing: “Behind Brodsky’s poetry is the experience of political terror, the experience of the debasement of man and the growth of the totalitarian empire. … I find it fascinating to read his poems as part of his larger enterprise, which is no less than an attempt to fortify the place of man in a threatening world.”
I enjoyed seeing the poet on video in this very short clip of an interview, in which he is speaking about how he personally strives against this debasement, not just of his own person, but of his fellow humans. Even without knowing the context of his words, we get another glimpse of his own soul when he tells about his efforts not to reduce people in his mind to simple categories, but to see their complexity, and their bravery. He says this is how you “winnow their essence.”
My minimal encounters with Joseph Brodsky encourage me to resist my own reductionist, categorizing tendencies. His is a voice I will continue to listen to.
“By failing to read or listen to poets,
society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation,
those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.”
The birds have vanished into the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
-Li Po (701 – 762) China
High Mountains Clear Autumn 1, by Terasaki Kogyo
The poem as translated above I found in Czeslaw Milosz’s collection, Luminous Things, but there is at least one more translation, which goes like this:
MOON OVER MOUNTAIN PASS
All the birds have flown up and gone; A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. We never tire of looking at each other – Only the mountain and I.
My most honorable eyes. You are not in the best shape. I receive from you an image, less than sharp, And if a color, then it’s dimmed. And you were a pack of royal hounds With whom I would set forth in the early morning. My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, Lands and cities. Islands and oceans. Together we greeted immense sunrises, When the fresh air invited us to run Along trails just dry from cold night dew. Now what you have seen is hidden inside And changed into memory or dreams Slowly I move away from the fair of the world And I notice in myself a distaste For monkeyish dresses, shrieks and drum beats. What a relief. Alone with my meditation On the basic similarity in humans And their tiny grain of dissimilarity. Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point That grows large and takes me in.
When I am reading any sort of literature I often think of what fellow blogger M.K. has said, (forgive me, M.K., if I am distorting this) that when she finds someone whose writer’s voice she particularly appreciates, it doesn’t matter the topic of the writing, she enjoys reading everything he or she produces.
Gladsome Lights 