undefinedJoseph Brodsky, ca. 1988. Photograph by Anefo/Croes, R.C.

Joseph Brodsky was interviewed in his Greenwich Village apartment in December, 1979. He was unshaven and looked harried. He was in the midst of correcting the galley proofs for his book—A Part of Speech—and he said that he had already missed every conceivable deadline. The floor of his living room was cluttered with papers. It was offered to do the interview at a more convenient time, but Brodsky would not hear of it.

The walls and free surfaces of his apartment were almost entirely obscured by books, postcards, and photographs. There were a number of pictures of a younger Brodsky, with Auden and Spender, with Octavio Paz, with various friends. Over the fireplace were two framed photographs, one of Anna Akhmatova, another of Brodsky with his son, who remains in Russia.

Brodsky made two cups of strong instant coffee. He sat in a chair stationed beside the fireplace and kept the same basic pose for three hours—head tilted, legs crossed, the fingers of his right hand either holding a cigarette or resting on his chest. The fireplace was littered with cigarette butts. Whenever he was tired of smoking he would fling his cigarette in that direction.

His answer to the first question did not please him. Several times he said: “Let’s start again.” But about five minutes into the interview he seemed to have forgotten that there was a tape recorder, or for that matter, an interviewer. He picked up speed and enthusiasm.

Brodsky’s voice, which Nadezhda Mandelstam once described as a “remarkable instrument,” is nasal and very resonant.

During a break Brodsky asked what kind of beer the interviewer would like and set out for the corner store. As he was returning through the back courtyard one of his neighbors called out: “How are you, Joseph? You look like you’re losing weight.” “I don’t know,” answered Brodsky’s voice. “Certainly I’m losing my hair.” A moment later he added: “And my mind.”

When the interview was finished Brodsky looked relaxed, not at all the same man who had opened the door four hours before. He seemed reluctant to stop talking. But then the papers on the floor began to claim his attention. “I’m awfully glad we did this,” he said. He saw the interviewer out the door with his favorite exclamation: “Kisses!”

 

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to start with a quotation from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s book, Hope Abandoned. She says of you, “He is . . . a remarkable young man who will come to a bad end, I fear.”

            JOSEPH BRODSKY

In a way I have come to a bad end. In terms of Russian literature—in terms of being published in Russia. However, I think she had in mind something of a worse denomination—namely, physical harm. Still, for a writer not to be published in his mother tongue is as bad as a bad end.

INTERVIEWER

Did Akhmatova have any predictions?

 BRODSKY

Perhaps she did, but they were nicer, I presume, and therefore I don’t remember them. Because you only remember bad things—you pay attention to them because they have more to do with you than your work. On the other hand, good things are originated by a kind of divine intervention. And there’s no point in worrying about divine intervention, because it’s either going to happen or it’s not. Those things are out of your control. What’s under your control is the possibility of the bad.

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 “condened 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

Do you get very sensitive about the way someone renders you into English?

BRODSKY

My main argument with translators is that I care for accuracy and they’re very often inaccurate—which is perfectly understandable. It’s awfully hard to get these people to render the accuracy as you would want them to. So rather than brooding about it, I thought perhaps I would try to do it myself.

Besides, I have the poem in the original, that’s enough. I’ve done it and for better or worse it stays there. My Russian laurels—or lack of them—satisfy me enough. I’m not after a good seat on the American Parnassus. The thing that bothers me about many of those translations is that they are not very good English. It may have to do with the fact that my affair with the English language is fairly fresh, fairly new, and therefore perhaps I’m subject to some extra sensitivity. So what bothers me is not so much that the line of mine is bad—what bothers me is the bad line in English.

Some translators espouse certain poetics of their own. In many cases their understanding of modernism is extremely simple. Their idea, if I reduce it to the basics, is “staying loose.” I, for one, would rather sound trite than slack or loose. I would prefer to sound like a cliché . . . an ordered cliché, rather than a clever slackness.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been translated by some impeccable craftsmen—

BRODSKY

I was quite lucky on several occasions. I was translated by both Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht—