Triangles: Brodsky on Rilke

Russian Literature XL VII (2000) 273387 North-Holland

www.elsevier.nl/locate/ruslit

T R I A N G L E S : B R O D S K Y O N R I L K E

L E O N B U R N E T T

Straight down the crooked lane, And all round the square]

Triangulation is a technique used by surveyors and navigators to determine distances. It is also a term used in chess theory to describe a "stratagem" by which one player "can manoeuvre in the triangle" to gain a tempo that will lead to an advantageous position, while the other player "must stick to the straight line". 2 In both cases, the cardinal principle underlying triangulation is the proposition that an indirect approach to a task will yield results that cannot be achieved by direct means. This assumption is, of course, axiomatic for creative writers of all kinds. As Joseph Brodsky remarked at the end of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize: "for a man of my occupation, the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points lost its attraction a long time ago" (OGAR, 61). 3 This declaration is confirmed not only, self-evidently, in the rich allusiveness of his poetry, but also in his prose style. While many forms of indirection exist (and in the course of this paper I shall consider two others favoured by Brodsky, namely subtraction and amalgamation), there are good grounds for invoking triangulation as the primary device in Brodsky's approach to Rainer Maria Rilke.

Brodsky wrote three substantial prose pieces in which Rilke may be counted as a central participant. Two of these were written in Russian and the third in English, although all three have been translated into Brodsky's other language. 4 They are: (i) 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii' (1981), translated as 'Footnote to a Poem' ;5 (ii) 'Prime~anie k kommentariju' (1992), translated as

0304-3479/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0304-3479(00)00016-8

274 Leon Burnett

'A Footnote to a Commentary'; 6 and (iii) 'Ninety Years Later' (1994), translated as 'Devjanosto let spustja'. 7 In none of these three essays does Brodsky address Rilke directly. Each time, a form of mediation, or what I am calling triangulation, occurs. One may distinguish between the triangular approach in 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii' and 'Prime~anie k kommentariju', where Brodsky uses Rilke as a point of reference in order to acquire a particular purchase on his main subject (Marina Cvetaeva's poem 'Novo- godnee' [ 'New Year's Greetings'] in the former, and Boris Pasternak's two poems entitled 'Magdalina' ['Magdalene'] in the latter), and what is done in 'Ninety Years Later', where Rilke's poem 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes' is the subject of a sustained analysis conducted mainly through Leishman's English translation. Thus, to differentiate between the two approaches, it might be said that in the first two essays Rilke is implicated as a subtextual presence, whereas in the third essay one of Rilke's major poems is explicated. In what follows, I shall divide my attention between the implicated Rilke of the first two publications, as a means of introducing some of the significances, and inter-connections, of triangulation, subtraction and amalgamation, and the explicated Rilke of 'Ninety Years Later', an essay which may be regarded as constituting Brodsky's most substantial critical investigation into the German writer's work.

The implicated Rilke

The violence of interpretation is unavoid- able; no footnote can ameliorate it. 8

Brodsky's admiration for Cvetaeva's poetry is well established. In 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii', Brodsky offers a sustained take on his predecessor. 9 His reading of 'New Year's Greetings' typifies an intricate attention to textual detail combined with speculative generalisations that we find also in such essays as 'On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden' (LTO, 304-356) and 'Wooing the Inanimate: Four Poems by Thomas Hardy' (OGAR, 312- 375). These readings of one poet by another poet comprise homages that help illuminate hidden recesses in the very process of literary creation with unexpected light as much as they clarify the ostensible subject. They are, in this respect, testimonies to the fact that, for Brodsky, "the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points lost its attraction a long time ago".

I should like to dwell upon this comment in order to introduce the second form of indirection to which I have referred, namely subtraction. Although the straight line had lost its attraction for Brodsky as a geometric measure of distance (or, rather, of proximity), he nevertheless found iconic

Triangles: Brodsky on Rilke 275

uses for it. In a poetic economy, informed willy-nilly by postmodernism, Brodsky's bottom line always amounted to less than one, to apart o f speech. His take on reality, it would seem, was synonymous with a taking away, a subtraction.l° In 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii', Brodsky plays upon the fact that the mathematical representation of subtraction - the minus sign - happens to be a short straight line. The significance of taking away is acknowledged in his reaction to Cvetaeva, where it is associated with other kinds of taking. 11 The fact that writing, of necessity, takes time and takes place contributes to his understanding of the ontology of the creative process itself. 12

Nowhere is the device of the minus sign more imaginatively explored in Brodsky's work than in his writing on Cvetaeva - in 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii' and in 'A Poet and Prose' (LTO, 176-194). At the root of an extensive network of lines that connects Brodsky to Cvetaeva, and Cvetaeva to Rilke (for her 'New Year's Greetings' is an elegy on the death of the German poet), is the identification of subtraction with punctuation, of the minus sign with the dash. In 'A Poet and Prose' (1979), Brodsky wrote of the "acceleration" of Cvetaeva's syntax that:

The only way in which her style approaches the telegraphic is through her principal punctuation mark, the dash, identifying proximity of phenomena as well as leaps across the self-evident. That dash does serve one more purpose, though: it crosses out a great deal in Russian literature of the twentieth century. (LTO, 182)

In this comment, Brodsky demonstrates his awareness that the dash is a straight line that both connects and separates, asserts and denies. When, two years later (in 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii'), he returns to Cvetaeva - to dilate upon her poem 'New Year's Greetings' -Brodsky introduces his subject with the observation that in the composition of an elegy "the author is hampered [...] by the strictly personal, private experience of loss: something has been taken away from him" (LTO, 196). This Donne-like observation serves as the premise for a metaphysical undercurrent that runs through the whole essay linking the ideas of death and subtraction. Thus, attending to the punctuation in the first line of 'Novogodnee' -

C H O B b l M r o j I O M -- CBeTOM -- K p a e M -- KpOBOM!

- Brodsky notes the shift from the horizontal dash to the vertical exclamation mark. The conjunction of the two forms of punctuation is read as a stepping up in diction ("an ecstatic effect, an effect of emotional soaring") and direction ("ascending stairs"). 13 The dash is described as "Cvetaeva's sign of equality (or inequality)" (LTO, 205-206). Later in his exegesis, Brodsky explains the significance of the "equals sign" for Cvetaeva:

276 Leon Burnett

Tsvetaeva the poet was identical to Tsvetaeva the person; between word and deed, between art and existence, there was neither a comma nor even a dash: Tsvetaeva used an equals sign. Hence, it follows that the device is transferred to life, that what develops, instead of crafts- manship, is the soul; that in the end they are the same thing. (LTO, 220)

In other words, Cvetaeva's poetry is motivated by ethical rather than aesthe- tic considerations: art in the light of conscience. It is Cvetaeva's ethical strategy that confers upon her the authority to arbitrate between Rilke and Brodsky, or to return to my original figure, to form a base to the triangle in which the two male poets meet at the apex. 14 The whole essay may he seen as an exercise in triangulation, the objective of which is to affirm the proposition, central to Brodsky's poetics, that "absence [...] is synonymous with presence in some other place and, in this way, expands the notion of being" (LTO, 261). The "other place" is made present through the signification ("itemization") of language, which thus constitutes the ultimate (ethical) reality. ~5

[T]he difference between language (art) and reality is specifically that any itemization of whatever no longer is or does not yet exist is an entirely independent reality in itself. That is why nonbeing, i.e. death, consisting utterly and entirely of absence, is nothing but a continuation of language. (LTO, 261)

The dominant effect of 'New Year's Greetings', according to Brodsky, is one of estrangement. "[E]strangement is at the same time both the method and the subject of this poem", he writes (LTO, 221). The sense of estrangement is the result of loss, of subtraction. Brodsky, however, offers the para- doxical proposition that Rilke, in being taken from Cvetaeva (in death), is given to her (as an "ideal listener"). Thus, as in the practice of triangulation in a game of chess, loss - of tempo, of time - is the precondition of gain. Cvetaeva's quality of vision, Brodsky contends, is such that she is able "to switch the places of subtrahends", allowing her "to abandon her hero and to look at even him from afar". That is to say, Cvetaeva is capable of reversing the terms of the existential and mathematical formula, changing it from

Cvetaeva - Rilke = 'Novogodnee' [Cvetaeva without Rilke produces an elegy on the theme "death of the poet"]

to

Rilke - Cvetaeva = "x" [Rilke without Cvetaeva becomes the compositional focus of the poem]


In the revised formula, "x" is equivalent to 'Novogodnee', but at the stage of creation (composition) rather than of conception (theme). If switching subtrahends produces the same result, then the minus sign can be transformed into an equals sign.

It is as if Cvetaeva, in demonstrating her ability to absorb alterity, managed to achieve the necessary sense of estrangement to enable her to write her poem. She is, in Brodsky's words, "the author of the poem who 'sees' Rilke 'seeing' all of this" (i.e. his homeland of yesterday as one of the stars) (LTO, 219). r6 This is, of course, very fluid mathematics, mathematics with a poetic edge, in which Brodsky (as critic) encounters Rilke (as inter- locutor) on common ground: Cvetaeva's poem.

The third device of indirection mentioned at the start of this paper was amalgamation. The idea of the amalgam, as a particular kind of composite, exercised a strong fascination on Brodsky. It is defined literally (in the New Webster's Dictionary of the English Language) as an "alloy of mercury with another metal or metals", although the dictionary goes on to attribute to the word the figurative sense of "a mixture or combination". For Brodsky, the amalgam is associated with mirrors in that they have the capacity to absorb, as much as to reflect, images. In Watermark, a prose meditation on Venice as a city of reflections and phantasmagoria, Brodsky elaborated upon his idea of the amalgam to propose "a theory of excessive redundancy, of the mirror absorbing the body absorbing the city":

The net result is, obviously, mutual negation. A reflection cannot pos- sibly care for a reflection. The city is narcissistic enough to tum your mind into an amalgam, unburdening it of its depths. 17

Here, the mind is conceived of as an amalgam that transforms the (once) physical reality into the metaphysical. Transformation of this kind implies a formidable condensation: layer pressed down on layer to become no more than a two-dimensional surface - a mirror, a chess-board, a sheet of paper 1~ - upon which the act of triangulation may be performed. In 'How to Read a Book', Brodsky wrote:

The point is that being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation - especially one on paper. (OGAR, 100) 19

In 'After a Journey' (OGAR, 62-80), an acerbic account of a visit to Brazil, Brodsky employed the concept of the amalgam once again. After re- marking upon the "huge, lake-like mirror" in his hotel room, which "did not so much reflect as absorb what was happening in the room", Brodsky corn-

278 Leon Burnett

ments that he had to make an effort, when going out to the city, "to tear my mind off that glass". He then adds a tantalising comparison:

Something like that happens with verses, pursuing you relentlessly although totally unrelated to the present moment - with your own or someone else's, and with English even more frequently than Russian, especially with Auden's. [...] perhaps this impression could be explain- ed by an unwitting narcissism, one's image acquiring in the mirror, thanks to the decaying amalgam, a shade of detachment, a certain extemporal savor; for the essence of any reflection is interest not so much in one's own person as in the very fact of viewing oneself from without. (OGAR, 72)

It is quite clear that Brodsky's repeated references to the amalgam derive from his personal experience of a psychic state in which the mind relaxes its hold, becomes detached, such as occurs, say, in the widely attested condition of d~jit vu or in what Keats called Negative Capability. These are states of mind that Bergson called intuitive (as opposed to the analytic or intellectual), when the "extemporal savor" to which Brodsky refers, is some- how triggered into activity. 2° The effect in such states of mind is to induce a narcissistic sense of self-as-other or, as Brodsky puts it, of "viewing oneself from without". It is just this effect that Brodsky attributes to Cvetaeva in 'New Year's Greetings'. 21 In one way or another, according to Brodsky, Cvetaeva had been engaged in taking a look at herself "from a distance" all her life. This, however, was only part of her achievement:

To look at yourself through the eyes of Rilke is something else. But in this too, we must suppose, she engaged rather frequently [...] To look at herself through the eyes of the deceased Rilke's soul wandering in space, and moreover to see not herself but the world abandoned by him

- is something that requires a spiritual optic capability which we don't know that anyone has. (LTO, 217)

In 'Prime6anie k kommentariju', a similar form of triangulation is applied in the attempt to trace the psychological and emotional origins of Pastemak's two 'Magdalina' poems of 1 9 4 9 - "Cut' no6', moj demon tut kak tut..." and "U ljudej pred prazdnikom uborka..." - to their sources in the poet's reading of Rilke's 'Pieta' and Cvetaeva's "O putjach tvoich pytat' ne budu...",

• o 2 respectively." The poems, as it were, form an amalgam, the constituent ele- ments of which Brodsky seeks to identify. 23 In his account of Pastemak's appropriation of the poetry of his two precursors, Brodsky challenges Harold Bloom's proposition that influence has become a site of anxiety from which all modem poets suffer. The anxiety of influence, far from being a patho-

Triangles." Brodsky on Rilke 279

logical condition, Brodsky maintains, is merely an affliction of the barbarian, for culture thrives on echo.

Fear of influence, fear of dependence, is the fear - the affliction - of a savage, but not of culture, which is all continuity, all echo .24

This truism is confirmed by the way in which poets return again and again to the same devices, to variations on the theme of repetition: pastiche, imitation of genre and stanza, formal structures such as the sonnet, the terza rima, the rondeau and the ghazel. It is for this reason, Brodsky claims, that Pasternak wrote not one, but two poems with the common title 'Magdalina': the first carrying a distinct echo of Rilke, the second - of Cvetaeva. The main concern is not for the (negative) "hypnotic effect" that is a result of the overwhelming imaginative presence of a predecessor with whom a poet shares an affinity, which would be akin to a straight line, but that the (positive) hypnotic force of the original should be reproduced in the transposed version. How would we act in such a case, Brodsky asks, putting himself in the place of Pasternak:

To rid ourselves of the hypnotic effect of the German text, we switch from pentameter to tetrameter, but to ensure an equally hypnotic effect in Russian, we use ABBA rhymes and recurring rhymes throughout, rhymes which create a sense of inevitability, of intimacy, and which establish the idiosyncratic character of the events. In contrast to Rilke, our task is not so much to express love and grief, but the achievement of faith through them. The theme, if you will, is religious revelation.25

The second poet in the creative series transforms the tonality of the original. Thus, Pasternak, for example, not only switches from the iambic pentameter to the tetrameter on the metric plane, but he also de-eroticises Rilke's treatment of Maria Magdalena on the thematic plane. Such a response is at once a subtraction and an augmentation of verses which, it might be claimed, have "pursued" the Russian poet.

The explicated Rilke

appetite's close relative: the sense of symmetry 26

Unlike 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii' and 'Primeranie k kommentariju', 'Ninety Years Later' was written in English. I repeat this compositional fact not simply in order to offer a circumstantial piece of information. It is significant for several reasons. Biographic'ally, it marks a gradual transfer of allegiance and orientation in Brodsky's literary output; linguistically, it enables the author to draw upon a second treasury; psychologically, it taps an alternative source of

280 Leon Burnett

cultural echoes and associations; and, from a literary perspective, it brings into play a new scope for the procedure of triangulation. If, in the two essays I have already discussed, Brodsky implicates Rilke in his inquiry into the poetry of two of the leading Russian poets of the twentieth century, here, in the third, he explicates Rilke on a foreign shore and in obedience to an entirely different territorial imperative.

This shift of perspective accounts, in part, for a lengthy excursus on boustrophedon in this essay. Brodsky defines boustrophedon - literally "ox way" - as

the kind of writing which is similar to plowing a field, when a furrow reaching the end of that field turns and goes in the opposite direction. In writing, this amounts to a line running from left to right and, upon reaching the margin, turning and running from right to left, and so on. (OGAR, 400)

This form of dcriture has obvious affinities with the theme of Rilke's poem (i.e. Orpheus's journey there and back), but it also engages - in interesting ways - with the fetch-and-take procedure of translation that 'Ninety Years Later' foregrounds. Translation, from this perspective, may be seen as a kind of serial dash, transporting the text unit by unit, until the job is done but the dash remains (or is converted to the icon for an arrow) to signify the hiatus between source and target. 27 Brodsky prefers, however, to develop the contrast already alluded to in 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii' between the horizontal and the vertical:

Whether it runs from right to left or vice versa, all that it [our dcriture] is armed with to convey numerous tonal modulations is the exclamation point and question mark. Comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, period - all these things punctuate the linear, which is to say horizontal, version of our verbal existence. (OGAR, 407) 28

The process of translation is the common factor in the shifts that I have indicated when Brodsky moves from Russian to English. It is no longer the Russian language (of Cvetaeva and Pastemak) that connects Brodsky to, and at the same time separates him from, Rilke. Instead, one is confronted with a rather different kind of amalgam: the intermediate layer between Rilke and Brodsky is filled by the English translation of J.B. Leishman. There are two important points to make about Brodsky's reliance upon an existing translation to explicate 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes' (1904), a poem that, as he states in the very first sentence of the essay, he considers to be a strong can- didate for nomination as "the greatest work of the century". 29 The first point is that he never lets the translation occlude the original - it takes on the quality of translucency like the alabaster statue in 'Galatea Encore', which


allows light to shine through and show "what it looks like inside a virgin". The second point is that the English translation is used to augment an understanding of the German poem. Brodsky makes good use of the translator's interpretation of his text, that is to say, his take on Rilke's treatment of the mythic material. Thus, a second triangular relationship duplicates the first. Leishman's intervention, which allows the living Brodsky access to the dead Rilke has its counterpart in the myth itself, where Hermes functions as intermediary between Orpheus and Eurydice. The correspondence between the two levels of triangulation may be reinforced by recalling that Hermes is the divine patron of translators.

"Translation is the father of civilization" (OGAR, 381). In this clich6 - a form of expression that is usually anathema to him - Brodsky acknowledges the positive value of a translation (especially when it is "a particularly good one"). In the course of the essay, he demonstrates repeatedly the bene- fits that accrue when a translation is consulted. We may, for example, point to the following remark to show how a lexical choice made by the translator helps to "amplify" a detail in the first line of the poem. Leishman translates Rilke's first sentence -

Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk.

- - a s

That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls.

Brodsky comments:

"Strange" serves here as an invitation to suspend the rational approach to the story, and the translator's amplification of wunderlich, as "unfathomed" suggests both the mental and the physical depth of the place we find ourselves in. (OGAR, 380)

In the terminology that is currently favoured in Translation Studies, a distinction is often made between two strategies available to the translator,

30 namely domestication andforeignisation. Brodsky places Leishman strictly, and approvingly, in the first category. Leishman, in regularising his penta- meters, he writes:

brings the poem into a metric mold familiar to English readers, enabling them to observe the author's line by line achievements in greater confidence. (OGAR, 382)

Subsequent translators, whether they have sought a "metrical equivalency" closer to the original in their "appetite for authenticity" or, alternatively,

282 Leon Burnett

yielded to "the vagaries of vers libre" in order to be "comme il faut", are roundly condemned ("in the past three decades translating Rilke has become practically a fad").

In Leishman's case, though, we clearly deal with the translator's surrender of his ego to the reader's comfort; that's how a poem ceases to be foreign. 31

To ensure that his reader remains comfortable, Brodsky follows up this comment by quoting the entire translation without the accompaniment of the original ("And here it is in its entirety").

This gives rise to an amusing situation when 'Ninety Years Later' is itself translated into Russian. Having noted that, in Leishman's case, the "translator sacrifices his own self-esteem [samoljubie] in the name of the reader's comfort", the translator continues: "Vot, celikom, ego tekst." Yet, what the Russian reader gets, is not Leishman's text at all, but a Russian translation of Leishman's translation. What is more, the essay 'Devjanosto let spustja', as printed in Pis'mo Goracij'u, is followed by a Russian translation of Rilke's poem (by A. Sergeev) from the German. Thus Leishman and Rilke are present only by proxy. The incongruity of this situation may be somewhat diverting, but ultimately the joke is on Brodsky, for Sumerkin succeeds admirably in domesticating his original. Brodsky, too, is absent!

The most obvious difference between 'Ninety Years Later' and its Rus- sian translation is that the former is far more idiomatic in expression. 32 To take an example from the first page of the essay: Brodsky ends his first para- graph with the remark that "what this poem adds up to can't be squared with any experience". In the Russian, this becomes: "v svoej sovokupnosti ono ne ravnozna~no nikakomu 6elove6eskomu opytu" (which, literally re-translated, may be rendered as "in its totality it is not equivalent to any human experience"). The mathematical nuances ("adds up to", "squared with") are dimi- nished and dispersed ("totality", "equivalent") into the more generalised domain of the human. When Brodsky picks up the mathematical allusion in the closing sentences of the first section of 'Ninety Years Later', the concept of squaring lends Brodsky' s language a characteristic thrust:

What our poet, technically speaking, has done in this poem is simply cross all the way over to the far end of this formula. That's why we find ourselves at the outset of 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes' squarely in the netherworld. (OGAR, 377; italics mine - L.B.)

Contextually, the quadratic sense of "squaring" is activated by the proximity of the references to addition, on its first occurrence, and to a formula, on its second. This subsidiary algebraic effect is not carried over in the translation (where "squarely in the netherworld" becomes "directly in the next world"


[prjamo na tom svete]). What this example affords is how Brodsky, in the English version, attempts, much more persistently than does the Russian translator, to impart the impression of a technical precision to his account of a mythic subject, by applying a quasi-scientific aspect to his analysis.

The "formula" to which Brodsky refers is: "If you leave, I'll die." This, as an earlier comment in the essay makes clear, is the formula of estrangement. Just as, in 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii', Brodsky considered estrangement to be the method and the subject of Cvetaeva's 'New Year's Greetings', so, in 'Ninety Years Later', he contends that it is the same feature that "this poem, in part, is about", and that it is "to this part in particular [sic!] that the poem owes its perennial appeal" (OGAR, 377). As I have already noted in discussing 'Ob odnom stichotvorenii', Brodsky regards subtraction as the mathematical equivalent of the existential condition of estrangement. Yet, as I also suggested, Brodsky sees this kind of loss as the means to gain. The gain, in this case, lies in the realm of myth. Myth, as Brodsky maintains, is a "revelatory genre", because' "myths illuminate the forces that [...] control human destiny". While we may wish to question the validity of referring to myth as a genre, we are quite likely to approve Brodsky's assertion that myth possesses a revelatory force, which, in another extended allusion to the world of mathematics, he calls a "vector":

One gets here the sense that Rilke is stealing Eurydice from Orpheus to a far greater degree than the myth itself calls for. [...] One thing is certain: our poet is far more interested in the forces pulling the heroine away from life than in those that might bring her back to it. In this, however, he doesn't contradict the myth but extends its vector. (OGAR, 417)

Yet, although Rilke's attempt to "steal" Eurydice is in excess of the require- ments of the myth, it is, in the final analysis, the myth that uses Rilke, re- ducing him to a mouthpiece. 33 For myth, like language, exercises an absolute, despotic power over the poet, who is dependent on "everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished". 34 The poet is merely "language's means of existence". Time, as we have seen already, is not on his side, for language "possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential - that is by all time lying ahead". 35

Orpheus symbolises the centrifugal pull of the living poet, Eurydice the centripetal resistance of the autonomous dead, 36 and Hermes the intermediary who acts, in this poem, as the guarantor of triangulation (in that he makes up the third), 37 of amalgamation (in that he is also known as Mercury, the

38 n n quicksilver god of the mirror), and subtractio (i that he is responsible for taking Eurydice away from Orpheus). Brodsky's take on this last aspect, however, is to argue that subtraction is not merely consigned to the thematics

284 Leon Burnett

of the story. He explicates the poetic "economy" of Rilke's title to demon- strate the manner in which the three mythological figures stand on equal terms. What is placed between them, to separate and to connect, is not a dash, not an equals sign, but a full stop. But it is the full stop that is also subtracted. And that subtraction, that absence of punctuation, is the sign of divinity: "There is no full stop after Hermes, and he is the last. Why?"

Because he is a god, and punctuation is the province of mortals. To say the least, a period after a god's name won't do, because gods are eternal and can't be curbed. (OGAR, 388)

Rilke, Brodsky can't help punning, "takes" the etiquette of the use of divinity in poetry "a dot further" than Dante, "pairing Orpheus and Eurydice in their finality but leaving the god literally open-ended" (OGAR, 388). Divinity, like triangles, resists further closure.

If the great potential of language lies in the future, then the power of myth is that it draws upon all time that has ever been. "[L]et's equate myth with memory", Brodsky exclaims in mock-exasperation, attempting to short- circuit what threatens to be an endless, and endlessly dispiriting, topic. Ril- ke's poem, then, regarded in this way, "is not so much a rendition of the myth as its growth" (OGAR, 395). Growth, however, conveys an idea that may easily be misconstrued. What takes place in any radically new interpretation of a myth involves the release of imaginative energy of such intensity that it may be compared to a cultural explosion. 39 We should not regard the result- ing work, a finite mapping of infinity, in the same way as we would a product of organic development. After the explosion, when all the versions of a particular mythologem have coalesced in a new configuration, what is produced is a super-amalgam. The achievement of Rilke's poem was that, in fusing to- gether the names "Orpheus", "Eurydice" and "Hermes", it expanded our sense of the myth [...] and of Chronos, "since he is the one to whom all myths point anyway" (OGAR, 427). Brodsky's service - ninety years later - has been to explicate Rilke's achievement in an essay that offers itself as a trigonometric blueprint.


NOTES

10

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Lewis Carroll, Epigraph to Knot 2 of 'A Tangled Tale', in The Complete Illustrated Works, London 1982, p. 650. See Reuben Fine, Basic Chess Endings; 2nd ed., London 1941, p. 80. All quotations from Brodsky's prose will be given in their English version. The following abbreviations are used: LTO for Less Than One: Selected Essays, London 1987; and OGAR for On Grief and Reason: Essays, London 1997. For the purposes of this essay, Russian and English are taken to be Brodsky' s two languages, although I am conscious of the simplification that this entails. Another linguistic dichotomy that is important for Brodsky is between poetry and prose. In 'Footnote to a Poem', he writes: "poetry, in essence, is itself a certain other language - or a translation from such" (LTO, p. 234). See Brod~kij o Cvetaevoj, Moskva 1997, pp. 77-155 for the original, and LTO, pp. 195-267 for the translation (by Barry Rubin). See Pis'mo Goraco'u, Moskva 1998, pp. 121-151 for the original, and Ste- phanie Sandier (Ed.), Rereading Russian Poetry, New Haven 1999, pp. 183- 201 for the translation (by Jamey Gambrell and Alexander Sumerkin). An edited version of the Gambrell/Sumerkin translation appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1999, pp. 13-16, under the headline "A Hid- den Duet". See OGAR, pp. 376-427 for the original, and Pis'mo Goraco'u, pp. 207-258 for the translation (by A. Sumerkin). David Farrell Krell, Introduction to Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy (Transl. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi), San Francisco 1984, p. 11. See 'A Poet and Prose' (LTO, p. 180), where Brodsky writes: "A multiplicity of meanings presupposes a corresponding number of attempts to comprehend, that is, several takes; and what is a take if not a unit of time?" Brodsky repeatedly associates the poet with the concept of reduction. Com- pare, for example, his comment in 'Wooing the Inanimate' that "language is capable of arrangements that reduce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe. That it is language that utilizes a human being, not the other way around" (OGAR, p. 333). Taking the next step (in language [LTO, p. 187]), being taken far (by speech or by language [LTO, pp. 188, 203]) and taking off(in language - "from the gutters into the empyrean", "operating at the vocal limit" [LTO, pp. 231, 267]) are but some of the many examples of the trope of language as con- veyance (cf. LTO, p. 202; OGAR, p. 399). On momentous events "taking place", see LTO, pp. 194, 196, 203. In 'How to Read a Book', Brodsky comments: "After all, what goes into writing a book [...] is, ultimately, a man's only life: good or bad but always finite" (OGAR, p. 97).

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In other words, a take-off Brodsky employs the same figure to suggest elevation in a poem by Hardy: "'Arose' and 'overhead' tell you the route our poet chooses. He goes for a full-scale elevation here; in fact, for an epiphany, for a complete takeoff with clear-cut ecclesiastical connotations" (OGAR, p. 330). Cvetaeva's command of the German, as well as the Russian, language is another reason for conferring authority upon her. It is in this way, for example, that language bestows existence upon the unicorn, the animal that never was ("das Tier, das es nicht gibt"). See Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, p. 4. Rilke had employed the image of the star in the elegy that he had written to Cvetaeva in the summer of 1926. See LTO, pp. 217-218. The passage from Watermark is quoted and discussed at greater length in my reading of 'Galatea Encore' in Joseph Brodsky, The Art of A Poem (Eds. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina), Basingstoke 1999, pp. 150-176 (165-169), where I draw upon Rilke's notion of Zwischenriiume (from Sonnets to Or- pheus) in an explication of Brodsky's amalgam. These three items occupy a prominent place in Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (1872), a fantasy written by a mathematician. See The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll, London 1982, pp. 115-233 (133). Brodsky develops this point by noting that poetry teaches the value of "the mercurial [sic!] mental patterns of the species, alternatives to linear composition" (emphases added [OGAR, p. 100]). "I coincide with my own time and I realize that each state of my conscious- ness is unique, as it absorbs the past which by definition is constantly growing," Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson, Oxford 1985, p. 25. Cvetaeva, in this sense, indulges in a self-regarding narcissism. See LTO, p. 216, and compare Brodsky's reference to Pastemak's "egocentricity" in 'A Footnote to a Colnmentary', Rereading Russian Poetry, p. 186. Brodsky acknowledges this in the essay, when he refers to the "summits of this majestic triangle" ('A Footnote to a Commentary', Rereading Russian Poetry, p. 192). Ostensibly the psychological triangle in 'Prime~anie k kommentariju' consists of Pasternak, Cvetaeva and Rilke, but, since part of Brod- sky's strategy in this essay is to put himself in the place of Pastemak, 'Prime6anie k kommentariju', in effect, revisits the earlier poetic grouping (of Brodsky-Cvetaeva-Rilke) in 'Footnote to a Poem'. A significantly new dimension is added, however, by extending the discussion of transference, confined in the earlier essay to the linguistic level (German-Russian), to include that of gender (Christ-Magdalene). In this essay, however, Brodsky claims to be more concerned with the inter- relation between Pasternak and Cvetaeva, arguing that their two poems amount epistemologically to a single composition in which Pasternak "absorbs" Cvetaeva. It is this emphasis perhaps that led the copy editor of the Times Literary Supplement to impose the somewhat misleading headline, "A

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Hidden Duet", and to gloss it with the inadequate summary: "The intimate connection between the 'Magdalene' poems of Boris Pastemak and Marina Cvetaeva." 'A Footnote to a Commentary', Rereading Russian Poetry, p. 184. The translation in the TLS leaves out a parenthetical reference to Harold Bloom that follows this remark. Ibid., p. 185. OGAR, p. 331. Brodsky is referring to metaphysical appetite. The translated poem results from the accumulation of lines (or dashes). Should the lines proceed downwards in ever-increasing length, the poem would take on a triangular shape similar to the one that Brodsky identifies in Hardy and likens to a pyramid. See 'Wooing the Inanimate', OGAR, p. 336. Brodsky goes on to contrast the horizontality of dcriture with the vertical arrangement of Chinese characters: "one may long for a pictogram over an ideogram" (OGAR, pp. 407-408). Hyperbole is a trademark of Brodsky's style. For a succinct account, see the entry on 'Strategies of translation' by Lawrence Venuti in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Ed. Mona Baker, assisted by Kirsten Malmkj~er), London 1998, pp. 240-244. OGAR, p. 382. The translator as Echo is the antithesis of the "narcissistic" Cvetaeva or the "egocentric" Pastemak of the essays that implicate Rilke. Puns, especially, form part of Brodsky's idiomatic repertoire. For instance, in reference to "the terror of Cerberus", he writes that "Orpheus appears to be literally dogged by fear" (OGAR, p. 398). The effect of these puns tends to be weaker in the Russian translation. In the example given in this footnote, the metaphoric "dogged by fear" is transformed into a simile ("strach bukval'no presleduet Orfeja, kak gon6ij pes"). Brodsky writes: "a myth engenders its mouthpiece century after century in every culture" (OGAR, p. 395). Brodsky's Poetics and Aesthetics (Eds. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina), Basingstoke 1990, p. 10. Ibid. See section XXIX of 'Ninety Years Later' on Eurydice as a centripetal, autonomous entity (OGAR, pp. 414-415). The centripetal-centrifugal anti- nomy is a favourite with Brodsky. As "god of faring and of distant message" (OGAR, p. 405; my italics - L. B.), Hermes not only "makes up the third", but in "faring" and "far-ing" he has the ability to determine distances. See my discussion of 'Galatea Encore', in Joseph Brodsky, The Art of A Poem, pp. 150-176 (166-167). +'Vocally speaking, Rilke's poem and the ancient myth are one. More exactly, their euphonic difference equals nil. Which is what he is to show [when] Eurydice is introduced, and the vocal explosion goes off" (OGAR, p. 408).

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Triangles: Brodsky on Rilke