Ambassador of the Fragmented

...Whereas his earlier poems sometimes tottered under the weight of ideas, not to mention an occasional convoluted conceit, he now writes more straightforwardly...

...In truth there's a conscience as well—if it comes to that...

...In his more recent work he seems resigned to brokenness, even to the disintegration of the mind...

...As for writers, "A man gets reduced to a pen's rustle on paper, to/wedges, ringlets of letters, and also, due to the slippery surface, to commas and full stops" ("December in Florence...

...Still, the literary tradition underlying a poem is often as inaccessible to the foreign reader as the language itself...

...Despite his plea to Leonid Brezhnev for "an opportunity to continue to exist in Russian literature and on Russian soil," he was deported, having been classified, for bureaucratic purposes, as a Jewish dissident...

...In his Foreword to Brodsky's Selected Poems, W. H. Auden conceded that "a really accurate judgment upon a poem as a verbal object can, of course, only be made by persons who are masters of the same mother-tongue as its maker...

...So much for your truth, I say, Karl, old chap...

...Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all...

...What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide, and plenty of room for vision...

...His love poetry in Selected Poems—especially "Stanzas," the pieces dedicated to MB, and the poignant "Adieu, Mademoiselle Veronique"—brooded on suffering, loss, renunciation...

...man survives like a fish, stranded, beached, but intent on adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish, wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then to depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen) for the interior, the heart of the continent...

...Ably assisted by 10 translators, he has assembled here primarily poems written since he came to the United States in 1972...

...Thus "Lullaby of Cape Cod," for all its poignancy, ends on a note of wry humor...

...Although Brodsky has at times experimented with absurdist theories ("Homage to Yalta," included in A Part of Speech, is a charming "apolgia for the absurd"), in general his "parts" are more traditional images of the lack of wholeness in our lives...

...Selected Poems required Kline's scholarly glosses to point out the resonances of Russian literature from Pushkin to Pasternak, reinforcing the impression of many readers that they were seeing Brodsky's verse through a glass darkly...

...The closest he ever came to a political statement was a sly dig at Marx in "A Letter in a Bottle" (1969): Adieu to the prophet who said, "Forsooth, you've nothing to lose but your chains...

...Elsewhere, in a lighter vein, "I said the forest's only part of the tree./Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee...

...In the end, Joseph Brodsky says, "What gets left of a man amounts/to a part...

...To his spoken part...

...Throughout his career Brodsky has had to adapt to adverse conditions...

...But this acceptance has worked in Brodsky's favor as an artist...

...After a phantasmagoric description of his journey from one "Empire" to the other, the narrator settles down to contemplate, in the course of a solitary drunken evening, the Massachusetts coast, his past and possible future...

...Fortunately, the protests of influential cultural figures, including the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the poet Anna Akhmatova (who became Brodsky's mentor), effected his release after 18 months...

...whose mouth held ruins more abject/than any Parthenon—a spy, a spearhead/for some fifth column of a rotting culture" ("In the Lake District...

...Survival, in art, is associated with comedy (since tragedy ends in death...

...Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling—lastly, the seagull's metal cry...

...At a well-publicized trial in 1964 (a transcript of which was smuggled out of the USSR and published in this magazine: "The Trial of Iosif Brodsky," NL, August31,1964),he was accused of "parasitism" because he did not have a job...

...And in this book Joseph Brodsky speaks right to the heart...

...Since, like Auden, I know no Russian, I too can "only guess" how strong Brodsky's poems are in the original...

...In the past—in the metaphysical "Elegy for John Donne" and the religious "Nunc Dimittis"—he has striven for a transcendent vision of healing...

...On Poetry AMBASSADOR OF THE FRAGMENTED BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Ever since the children of Israel sat down and wept beside the waters of Babylon, exiled poets have wrestled with the problem of singing their Songs in an alien land...

...Brodsky's work has always been permeated with nostalgia for the absent...

...Particularly in exile, Brodsky has concerned himself with metaphysical themes that transcend cultural boundaries...

...Now this predicament has provided a subject for Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, in his second book, A Part of Speech (Farrar Straus Giroux, 152 pp., $12.95...

...Brodsky seems to feel a special affection for resorts, where transience is universal...

...He describes himself as one...

...Superbly translated by Anthony Hecht, the poem chronicles Brodsky's adjustment to his newfound land...

...In part, too, this may be the result of having to wrestle with a foreign language (a task Brodsky takes so seriously that his "Elegy: for Robert Lowell," included in this collection, was written in English...

...In the title poem of A Part of Speech (his own translation), Brodsky tells how the sounds and rhythms of his verse were shaped by his native landscape: I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos...

...Growing more and more drunk, he meditates upon that stranded fish—not only as the Darwinian symbol of adaptability in a new environment, but as the primeval form of life on its way to becoming human...

...In his loneliness, the speaker alternately addresses himself and an absent beloved...

...His own explanation is that "The bleaker things are, for some reason/the simpler" {"Strophes...

...Only sound needs echo, and dreads its lack...

...He has evolved new lungs to breathe the cosmopolitan air he must today live and write in: Preserve these words against a time of cold, a day of fear...

...Ultimately, Brodsky poses as a kind of roving ambassador of the broken and fragmented...

...In a heartbreaking image, the two, deprived of sleeping together, cannot even sleep at the same time, since they live in opposite hemispheres: "One solar source has never been enough/to serve two average bodies, not since the time/God glued the world together in its prime./The light has never been enough...

...Yet this is not merely a reductive process—after all, speech is what distinguishes man from the animals—but is rather a refining process, a reduction to essentials...

...Yet, somewhat mysteriously, he was singled out for harassment by the authorities...

...This marvelous poem speaks to every man's condition as a stranger and sojourner...

...It is also the cod?the aboriginal inhabitant of the New England coast—who reappears at the poem's close as a mysterious Yankee salesman on the threshold of the poet's drunken consciousness...

...I Sit by the Window...

...A glance is accustomed to no glance back...

...The young writer—he was only 24 at the time—was sentenced to five years of forced labor in the Arkangelsk region...

...Preserve these words" (an echo from Osip Mandelstam) serves as a kind of leitmotif: Speech, for Brodsky, defies the encroaching silence of death...

...This stanza is from "Lullaby of Cape Cod...

...In the period that followed, Brodsky never joined any dissident movement...

...Like many Russian writers, he had little opportunity to publish while in the Soviet Union (though the appearance of a few of his early poems in Aleksandr Ginzburg's underground journal, Sintaxis, in 1959-60, attracted the attention of other poets...

...So it comes as no surprise that, divorced from his cultural traditions, he should dwell on them as on the memory of a departed wife...

...The speaker is intrepid and resilient, however, as survivors must be...

...It might even be said that Brodsky—who has rendered the work of such poets as Eliot, Stevens, Frost, and Auden into Russian—shows in his verse an awareness of the problems of transposition...

...His first book, Selected Poems, translated by George L. Kline and consisting mostly of poems composed before he was expelled from the Soviet Union, appeared in 1973...

...He says, in "A Part of Speech": . . . when "the future" is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese...

...To a part Of speech...

...As Auden further observed, though, "About the uniqueness, and, at the same time, universal relevance of a poet's vision it is easier for a foreigner to judge since this does not primarily depend on the language in which it is written...

...Auden reckoned him an outstanding artist on the basis of his craftsmanship, which indeed shines through the most opaque of cultural and linguistic barriers...

...The judge, apparently unable to conceive of a vocation so nebulous as poetry, concluded that Brodsky was an imposter who "refused to work and continued writing his decadent poems and reciting them at evening parties...

...Nevertheless, in 1972 he was suddenly "invited" to leave the country...