Interviewed by Sven Birkerts

Interviewer:

To what extent are you using divine intervention as a kind of psychic metaphor?

Brodsky: Actually to a large extent. What I mean actually is the intervention of language upon you or into you. That famous line of Auden’s about Yeats: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” What “hurts” you into poetry or literature is language, your sense of language. Not your private philosophy or your politics, nor even the creative urge, or youth.

Interviewer: So, if you’re making a cosmology you’re putting language at the apex?

Brodsky: Well, it’s no small thing—it’s pretty grand. When they say “the poet hears the voice of the Muse,” it’s nonsense if the nature of the Muse is unspecified. But if you take a closer look, the voice of the Muse is the voice of the language. It’s a lot more mundane than the way I’m putting it. Basically, it’s one’s reaction to what one hears, what one reads.

Interviewer: Your use of that language—it seems to me—is to relate a vision of history running down, coming to a dead end.

Brodsky: That might be. Basically, it’s hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That’s what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man. That’s one of the closest insights into the nature of time that we’re allowed to have.

Interviewer: In your piece on St. Petersburg you speak of water as a “form of time.”

Brodsky: Ya, it’s another form of time... it was kind of nice, that piece, except that I never got proofs to read and quite a lot of mistakes crept in, misspellings and all those things. It matters to me. Not because I’m a perfectionist, but because of my love affair with the English language.

Interviewer: How do you think you fare as your own translator? Do you translate or rewrite?

Brodsky: No, I certainly don’t rewrite. I may redo certain translations, which causes a lot of bad blood with translators, because I try to restore in translation even those things which I regard as weaknesses. It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening. So, before doing that you have to cool off a great deal, and when you start you are looking upon your work as the soul looks from its abode upon the abandoned body. The only thing the soul perceives is the slow smoking of decay.

So, you don’t really have any attachment to it. When you’re translating, you try to preserve the sheen, the paleness of those leaves. And you accept how some of them look ugly, but then perhaps when you were doing the original that was because of some kind of strategy. Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader’s way to the impact of this or that line.

Interviewer: How about Russian writers?

Brodsky: I don’t know really quite whom I react to most. I remember the great impact Mandelstam’s poetry had on me when I was nineteen or twenty. He was unpublished. He’s still largely unpublished and unheeded in criticism and even in private conversations, except for the friends, except for my circle, so to speak. General knowledge of him is extremely limited, if any. I remember the impact of his poetry on me. It’s still there. As I read it I’m sometimes flabbergasted. Another poet who really changed not only my idea of poetry, but also my perception of the world—which is what it’s all about, ya?—is Tsvetayeva. I personally feel closer to Tsvetayeva—to her poetics, to her techniques, which I was never capable of. This is an extremely immodest thing to say, but, I always thought, “Can I do the Mandelstam thing?” I thought on several occasions that I succeeded at a kind of pastiche.

But Tsvetayeva. I don’t think I ever managed to approximate her voice. She was the only poet—and if you’re a professional that’s what’s going on in your mind—with whom I decided not to compete.

Interviewer: What was the distinctive element that attracted you but also frustrated you?

Brodsky: Well, it never frustrated me. She’s a woman in the first place. But hers is the most tragic voice of all Russian poetry. It’s impossible to say she’s the greatest because other people create comparisons—Cavafy, Auden—but I personally feel tremendously attracted to her.

It is a very simple thing. Hers is extremely tragic poetry, not only in subject matter—this is not big news, especially in the Russian realm—but in her language, her prosody. Her voice, her poetry, gives you almost the idea or sense that the tragedy is within the language itself. The reason I decided—it was almost a conscious decision not to compete with her—well, for one thing, I knew I would fail. After all, I’m a different person, a man what’s more, and it’s almost unseemly for a man to speak at the highest pitch of his voice, by which I don’t mean she was just a kind of romantic, raving... she was a very dark poet.

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