Brodsky in Two Worlds

...Those in his latest book, To Urania (Farrar Straus Giroux, 174 pp., $14.95), were issued in the original language a year ago by Ardis, the Michigan-based publisher, and have been rendered into English by the author and various hands...

...The image of the poetic outlaw—reckless, promiscuous in love, unconventional, and above all misunderstood—was adopted with especial fervor: No, I'm not Byron, its my role To be an undiscovered wonder, Like him a persecuted wand'rer, But furnished with a Russian soul declaimed Mikhail Y. Lermontov, whose meteoric genius was extinguished in a duel when the poet was only 27...

...Without knowing how many Russian readers have access to his work, one would guess that a substantial part of his public must be familiar with his verse only through translation...

...In fact, very little of his verse had appeared at that point, eveninsamizdat...

...Brodsky has provided copious biographical notes on the 11 poets he has chosen, whose birthdates range from 1783 to 1820...

...Schiller and Heine, Scott and Tom Moore set their fans in Eastern Europe to discovering rich strains in their own native and folk traditions...

...he literature that nourished Brodsky can be glimpsed by Americans in his A ? Age Ago: A Selection of NineteenthCentury Russian Poetry (Farrar Straus Giroux, 171 pp., $20.00) translated by Alan Myers...

...Anyone picking up this volume will be quickly disabused of that notion by the galaxy of intriguing, if lesser, luminaries Brodsky and Myers present...

...Baratynsky(1800-1844) wroteof "Experience, the cold that numbs the heart...

...However, his earlier trial for "parasitism" (see "The Trial of Iosif Brodsky," NL, August 31,1964), which led to an 18-month stint in Siberia, had already attracted the attention of Western intellectuals, and his banishment from the USSR catapulted him into the international literary community...

...because whenever one bothers to peruse it one discovers its pages contain nearly every insight or concept which our century claims as its own achievement...

...Nonetheless, he continues, there is a crucial difference between the worldview in that era and in our own: " An age ago, much less stood between a man and his thoughts about himself than today...

...Since leaving Russia, Brodsky has concentrated on the predicament of the poet caught between two antagonistic cultures...

...E.A...

...The poet who towered above all his fellows, though, was Pushkin...

...He has also contributed an introductory essay that puts forward some provocative propositions...

...Our poetic precursors, in other words, still felt a sense of harmony we no longer possess in our polarized, fragmented, specialized condition...

...Because the Romantic poet escaped the feelings of artistic futility that beset his modern counterparts, Brodsky insists, he speaks to us as a liberator to the enslaved...

...and, like leucocytes in the blood, full moons in the works of bards burning with tuberculosis, claiming it is with love...

...Such a passage might well pass for the effort of an English or American poet...

...Alan Myers succeeds more than any previous translator I have read in conveying how strongly the European and English Romantics influenced their Russian contemporaries...

...No matter how thoroughly they absorbed foreign influences, these Russian Romantics remained loyal to their culture...

...Modern in outlook and sometimes in technique, his striking voice carries well across the language barrier...

...Yazykov owes much to the drinking songs of Moore and Burns...

...More introspective and rational than his peers, he prefigures 20th-century A ngst, and has a knack for black humor: "Salons there are, some like a kindergarten, / and some, alas, a geriatric ward...

...The overarching theme that emerges from the verse in An Age Ago is nicely summed up by a Tyuchev stanza: Through reason Russia can't be known, No common yardstick can avail you: She has a nature all her own— Have faith in her, all else will fail you...

...When he received the Nobel Prize for literature last year it seemed to many as if the U.S...

...The Soviet Union, like Plato's Republic, tends to consider poets dangerous to the State...

...a fly stuck on a piece of flypaper resembles a "six-legged" Cyrillic letter whose sound (zh) also captures the insect's buzz...

...Particular conventions of interior rhyme that Brodsky employs in his own English translations must derive from Russian as well—no American poet would dare to say, "Light pries your eye...

...In his subsequent works the poet has constructed more and more bridges to help his audience cross the gulf between cultures...

...Certainly the poet takes unusual pains with the metamorphosis of his words from one tongue to another...

...Once in the United States, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Poets and established himself as a familiar voice on the lecture / reading circuit...

...his study of Byron and Shakespeare endowed him with a breadth as great as theirs...

...Seeking to avoid exile, Brodsky had pleaded with Leonid I. Brezhnev for "an opportunity to continue to exist in Russian literature and on Russian soil...

...Writers & Writing BRODSKY IN TWO WORLDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Collections of Joseph Brodsky's verse have been coming out here both in his native Russian and in English translation since shortly after the poet was deported to the West 15 years ago, at the age of 32...

...To judge how much, one need merely compare his more recent verse with the long final poem in this collection, "Gorbanov and Gorchakov," composed in 1968 before his deportation...

...Those age-old bonds will never slacken Around our homeland's patient woe: Whole centuries will grimly flow— Before our Russia starts to waken...

...Similes evoke Russian objects, ideas, even their alphabet: "Carafes on a tablecloth feign the Kremlin...

...had won another laurel...

...however he had not fallen victim to this knowledge...

...Even his political cynicism seems imbibed from Celtic laments for centuries of foreign occupation: The people's wrath finds no expression, The Russian mind is still in chains, And freedom yoked in stern oppression Conceals the thoughts of daring brains...

...Its a groan that with us is called singing— As the barge haulers strain in their team...

...Yet one catches at least a part of Pushkin's versatility in Myers' metrically faithful translations of some of the well-known short lyrics...

...For instance, there is FeodorlvanovichTyuchev (1803-1873), ardently admired by Tolstoy, Turgenev and Lenin...

...Such diplomatic conversation may, in the long run, prove as vital for the life of our cultures as any political détente...

...This series of conversations between two inmates of a Soviet mental hospital may make the English reader doubt his own sanity at times, it is so full of opaque references...

...Brodsky invokes Urania because, as patroness of Astronomy, she is " our Muse of the point lost in space...

...Muse of the things one makes out through a telescope only...

...oh, lure of the East...

...One catches the influence of Robert Lowell or Anthony Hecht—and unquestionably that of Auden—as well as a whiff of their Victorian progenitors...

...Although Brodsky now writes prose mostly in English, he continues to compose his poems in Russian...

...Unfortunately, this sampler cannot include the longer poems like Tsar Sultan, or the selections from Eugene Onegin or Boris Godunov that would be necessary to give an idea of his full range...

...Aside from Pushkin, and perhaps Lermontov, readers of English seldom encounter 19th-century Russian poets, and consequently of ten have the impression that the country produced few bards until the Revolution...

...She stands for the perspective of the outsider—the ironically detached observer, the man without a country...

...As ambassador of that powerful tradition, he seems to be devoting his artistic and critical powers to maintaining the dialogue between it and the outside world...

...Nevertheless, this international writer clings tenaciously to his origin...

...The melodic bravado that characterizes N.M...

...But Brodsky's themes have undergone cross-pollination with our literary tradition...

...The words resonate with a primary vigor as if they were composed in English...

...In English his poems display a mastery of form, dexterity with rhyme and meter, and an allusiveness one normally associates with neometaphysicals like Auden...

...His " free-flapping tongue, a glutton for pure lyric/ sends its Cyrillic thanks into the blue acrylic...

...The following section from "Venetian Stanzas," for example, with its ironic twists of meaning, witty off-rhymes, and alternating patterns of long and short lines adds up to an impressionistic picture of exotic decadence in the city of canals, so unmodern, so attractive to writers: Oh, nineteenth century...

...Like many a closed book," Brodsky writes, " the 19th century has never been read through [by us...

...N. A. Nekrasov's "Frost, the Red-nosed" captures the wretchedness of peasant life in a ballad shaped by Goethe's horrific "Der Erlkönig...

...he knew practically as much as we do about the natural and social sciences...

...His genius has been to make his private plight a metaphor for our century's alienation from the familiar certainties of the past...

...This trust in a unique identity is shared by Brodsky: More than Urania, Mother Russia inspires his poetry...

...Nekrasov's portraits of the "insulted and injured" may ring oddly in our ears—dactyls sound comic in English—but the descriptions call to mind Dostoyevsky (whom Nekrasov introduced to the world): Take the Volga: whose groan there goes winging, Floating over the great Russian stream...

...and oh, cliff top poses of exiles...