Значит, и ты уснул. Должно быть, летя к ручью, ветер здесь промелькнул, задув и твою свечу. Узнав, что смолкла вода, и сделав над нею круг, вновь он спешит сюда, где дым обгоняет дух.
Позволь же, старик, и мне, средь мертвых финских террас, звездам в моем окне сказать, чтоб их свет сейчас, который блестит окрест, сошел бы с пустых аллей, исчез бы из этих мест и стал бы всего светлей в кустах, где стоит блондин, который ловит твой взгляд, пока ты бредешь один в потемках… к великим… в ряд.
Иосиф Бродский 30 января 1963, Комарово
On the Death of Robert Frost
And so, you too are asleep. Perhaps, on its way to the brook, The wind through here did sweep And the flame from your candle took. Finding the water no more And circling once overhead, It hastens here as before, Where smoke and spirit contend.
Old man, may I also tell – Among these dead Finnish mounds – The stars in the sky to quell The light than now here abounds; To take the fire it imparts, To leave this alley and mall, And disappear from these parts, Becoming brightest of all In briarwoods, where a lone Blond youth is catching your gaze, While you shuffle off alone
To join the eternal blaze. 30 January 1963, Komarovo*
* A writer’s colony near St. Petersburg, where the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) lived in her last years. She called Joseph Brodsky’s early poetry “magical”. After her death, Brodsky was one of four young poets who became known collectively as “Akhmatova’s orphans”. [Translator’s note]
Joseph Brodsky (born May 24, 1940, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. — died January 28, 1996, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the Leningrad literary scene, but his independent spirit and his irregular work record led to his being charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labor. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested it. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977.
Brodsky developed a remarkable ability to integrate Anglo-Saxon and Russian traditions into his work. He dismissed the category of the tragic when explaining Frost's work and distanced himself from biography as a hermeneutic key. He also rejected tragedy as a way to explain the poetry of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, or Tsvetaeva. In all four cases, personal drama had frequently been considered the interpretive key to their work.
Originally from Odessa, Ukraine, Davíd is a recipient of an NEH grant and a participant in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
