4-11-2019

"Postcard from Lisbon", de Joseph Brodsky

The TLS, de 22-10-2019

OCTOBER 22, 2019

Poem of the Week: ‘Postcard from Lisbon’

‘Monuments to events that never took place: to bloody / but never waged wars’ – Joseph Brodsky

It is easy to think of Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) as a poet defined by exile from the Soviet Union, but, in some ways, he lived in exile even before he left.  After his father was removed from the Navy for being Jewish, Brodsky abandoned school in favour of unusual work, including stints as a coroner’s assistant and as part of a geology research team travelling to Central Asia. He attracted the interest of, and then thrived under the close mentorship of the Russian Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova. Throughout his twenties, however, his vocation as a writer brought him into conflict with the Soviet authorities, leading to his imprisonment in a labour camp. He was “strongly advised” to emigrate in 1972 and he never returned. After moving to the US, Brodsky’s poems were translated into multiple languages, including several times into English – something that he grew to dislike as his control over English, or at least his idiosyncratic “New York English”, increased. He considered these translations too smooth and too rhythmical, wanting his poems in English to reflect the ruggedness of the originals.

“Postcard from Lisbon” (published in the TLS in 1991, translated by Brodsky himself), fulfils this wish with its half-rhymed and intermittently rhythmical lines, which are themselves like the “Monuments to events that never took place” that Brodsky describes in the poem. He suggests that even imagined episodes of history, such as “the discovery / of Infarctica”, or that ideals – “happiness”, “the hand which never fondled money” – can still have real consequences: “never waged wars” can still be “bloody”. Events and images, like the words of the poem’s single unbroken sentence, all build up, waiting to burst the dam, until eventually dreams are able to impose “their chaos / on matter, by dint of the population”.