Three Poems
BRODSKY, JOSEPH
Qinstma POEMS BY JOSEPH BRODSKY Two Hours in an Empty Tank Demon. I am bored . Pushkin in "A Scene from Faust" I I am an anti-fascist anti-Faust. Ich liebe life, but chaos I adore. Ich bin...
...And such again were Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mannalas...
...The word nitahe is formed by adding the Russian comparative ending -eke to the Polish word nic ("nothing...
...and the Lord...
...The herr doktor writes on an envelope: "Gott strafe England, London, Francis Bacon...
...Candles flare up...
...Here they are left unitalicized in an attempt to produce something like the effect of the original...
...The Arab delegate, Meph-ibn-Stophel, peers from a corner at the Faustian profile...
...A Tree-Surgeon Quilt-jacketed, a tree-surgeon hopped, thrush-like, from a ladder-step to a high limb, throwing a bridge twixt bipeds: "feather-less" and "-ed...
...Und veni, vidi, vici...
...A jiidisch frau slips silently from the dark kitchen with an omelet that sizzles in salt-pork...
...8. The Polish konfederatka: a military cap with a square roof-like top...
...Once again the birches rustle in the wind...
...Man has a ceiling of his own, although its place and shape are not clearly defined...
...He visited, with flowers, her virgin room...
...But Dr...
...Faust knew less than nichts of God...
...God, then, looks down...
...It's here that featherless bipeds reveal that they are worlds apart (much more than by their high-domed heads) from feathered bipeds and their art...
...Ill A new moon glimmers in the ragged clouds...
...All mystic lore's an unsuccessful mask for our attempts to deal with them...
...VI Fraulein, pray tell, was ist das inkubus...
...A man stoops over a huge folio volume...
...The Fall had come...
...Could he track distant stars...
...Herr doktor, it's midnight.' "Jawoh!, muss schlafen, schlafen...
...He studied the card-player's catechism and crunched the candy of Cartesianism...
...qua man, he loses...
...it is also the standard Russian form of the name "Nietzsche...
...And what is more, cogito ergo sum...
...Set out glasses...
...Well-known Vienna waltzes fill the ear...
...Such then was Dr...
...But Klausewitz's sly craft of soldiering remained somehow beyond his kenperhaps because his own dear vater's craft was cabinet-making...
...6. The "Walter" is a kind of German pistol, something like the Lager...
...others it destroyed...
...I've tucked a hatchet underneath my pillow...
...Gut nacht, mein liebe herren...
...she would have preferred a better role...
...gut nacht...
...Faust sent an urgent message off to Cairo: consigned his soul pro forma to the devil...
...But this arrangement macht der grosse minus...
...The flatterer finds a corner in men's hearts;5 men see the devil, but to life they're blind...
...Their roaring tanks, like fingernails that smooth the tinfoil on a piece of chocolate, flattened the uhlan lancers...
...But, instead of a chirping song one heard the scraping sound of man...
...Two black mouths say "Meow...
...Are we not lower than these "beasts...
...A heavenly song is more befitting than hitting the wrong note in recital...
...the milling mob of bards and thinking men und readers drawn from a quite different class...
...And may God grant them all the time they need to ask, "Where to...
...September the First The day was called, simply, "September first...
...At Poland's border, Germans raised striped bars...
...But men, mein liebe herren, insofar as they're unsure about their stronger feelings, will lie like troopers, conscientiously, but Goethe-like, they'll let no chance slip by...
...He knew Arabic not Sanskrit...
...Fauelue, a work so disappointing (in Brodsky's view) that it caused many readers who had signed up for Mann's complete works (in Russian translation) to cancel their subscriptions...
...the German It*s silly to expect alles from men: "Oh, moment, stay, tbou art so very fair...
...The costume-changes, weather-changes, change of words, can't be kept track of...
...He snatched up handkerchiefs that women dropped...
...Enter and exeunt: devils and thoughts...
...Zum beispiel, cholera, glaucoma, plague, und auch tuberculosis, roared and raged...
...And men look up...
...On the mud field a skidding tractor roars...
...He was anointed Bachelor of Arts, then won his laurels as Licentiate, and sang in seminar of dinosaurs...
...Late, alas, in life he found his eine kleine fraulein, Margareta...
...Und, hocus-pocus, vicious heron flocks rose from the fog of Weimar to purloin the key from his deep pocket...
...Die teutschne spracho.- macht der grosse cosine: and nein, one's heart can't be consumed at home 2. An old form of the expre language" t. ' deiit.iclie Siiraeti...
...Noch grosser dichter Goethe framed a rebus...
...3. Mann "spoiled his subscription list" by publishing Dr...
...Jawohl...
...Ich Hebe life and the Volkisch Beobachter...
...Thus the years roll by unnoticed...
...We'll drink a toast to those uhlans who stood in first place on the roster of the dead, as on a classroom roster...
...September's here again...
...blade clashed on blade, as shivers ran down my tense spine and up again...
...Inkubus, das ist eine kleine globus...
...4. Gounod "embarrassed" the singer who had to take the part of Margareta in his opera Fauet...
...If we had some schnapps . . . so . . . abgemacht...
...dead leaves sift down on the low roofs of houses where no children's voices sound, as though on fallen Polish caps.8 The rumbling clouds crawl past, avoiding the dead eyes of sunset windows...
...Ich untershtant dat das ist ganze urchent...
...He left Krakow without shedding a tear and in his drozhky quickly drove away to take his Chair and lift a stein of beer...
...He takes his Walter6 from his heavy trousers and goes for good into the Walter-Klosett...
...What, qua poet, he gains...
...Taking the product of their nests, their brief lives, and the way they sing in total self-forgetfulness?we can define our lesser range...
...Time's torrent sweeps away their half-baked schemes, theirdonnerwetter!test-tubes, their last traces...
...1 recall the Virgin, standing in a niche,7 and breakfast served in bed...
...And then he crawled down the artesian well of ego-centrism...
...7. The Russian phrase poemoi boUhe, chetovekomnitehe contains a neologizing pun...
...Ich liebe neatness...
...When we unclose our beak-like shears in winter trees, we click and squeak: but we produce no arias...
...An honest German won't wait to discover der weg zuruck, even when he is invited...
...the children were at school...
...The Raven and the Fox...
...The devil walks among us hour by hour and waits, each moment, for this fatal phrase...
...He knew exactly where the devils lie...
...To ask the sense of ich bin, otherwise, is mad...
...And now, matrosen, we are on the rocks...
...Ich bin prepared, genosse offizieren, dem zeit zum Faust quite briefly to spazieren.1 U In old Krakow he mourned his vaterland, not being swayed by Polish propaganda, and sought the bright stone of philosophers, doubting the depth of his abilities...
...and heed the shouting Muses...
...The flesh saved some men...
...He warmed to questions of sexology...
...Zum beispiel, ceiling: prolegomenon to roof...
...He could...
...Do you sugchest dat he lufft flower-girlss...
...Eckermann's sharp eye was not enough to save us then...
...His trembling fingers hold a soft lead pencil...
...In the original text the scattered "German" words and phrases are printed in the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet, which makes them seem even more grotesque...
...His eyes show demon glints of arabesque...
...Meph came non-stoph: then Faust put on a new costume, and, glancing in the glass, convinced himself that he had been made young at last, to last forever...
...Faust may, in the end, have been afraid to die...
...IV Ich liebe clearness...
...Men who lack faith are both blind and inhuman...
...The man was German: German was his mind...
...V There is a mystic lore...
...And uber alles Germany, of course...
...faith...
...1. The "German" in this poem reproduces the fractured and ungram-matical speech of Soviet soldiers who served in Germany during World War II plus an occasional Yiddish expression...
...Und grosser dichter Goethe tripped and fell, which makes his theme ganz problematical...
...Moors and gypsies drew him...
...Some tasks are truly our own spirit's tasks...
...He tried to save himself by puffing schwarze cigaretten...
...They differ and yet have some points in common...
...I'm bored...
...And Thomas Mann spoiled his subscription list,3 while cher Gounod embarrassed his artiste.* For art is art is art...
...He knew how to dry das was-ser on the knee, and gauge tree-age from cross-sections...
...Enter and exeunt: seasons and guests...
...Beneath a chest a mouse makes scratching sounds...
...September...
...The moon is full...
...A crease deepens between his bushy brows...
...While God's being is natural, mere man has limitations which, I trust, are plain...
...He starred on the department's polo team...
...Against my legs a gray witch purrs...
...5. This line is a slight variation of a line in Krylov's fable...
...Kunst needs feeling's truth...
...But each has a peculiar interest of his own...
...Dispositions sour...
...Ich bin to beg you not to call it weakness...
...He had devoured the works of Avicenna and Galen...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 24
