Lyrics Of Loss, Theories of Gain

By Paul Gray

LITERATURE

Adrift in his native city of Leningrad in 1969, the young poet had good reason to feel depressed. He had spent 18 months laboring on a state farm in the Arctic, convicted by a Soviet court of being a "social parasite." Released but still convinced that his mission on earth was to write rather than surrender his skills to the dictates of the state, he faced bleak prospects: the official campaign to discredit him had taken on undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed "The End of a Beautiful Era," a poignant elegy on past illusions with a mordant conclusion about the future: "For the innocent head there is nothing in store but an ax/ and the evergreen laurel." Last week the eerie prophecy in these lines was fulfilled. Joseph Brodsky, 47, involuntarily cut off from his homeland in 1972, was given the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The laurel may be new to Brodsky, who is one of the youngest writers to be so honored in the Nobel's 86-year history, but the recognition of his talent is by now a familiar story. His early poems were championed by such older cultural luminaries as the poet Anna Akhmatova. Getting off a plane in Vienna as a new emigre, Brodsky was taken under the protection and guidance of W.H. Auden, who had a summer house nearby. Within months he found himself in Ann Arbor, a poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan assigned, as he later whimsically wrote, "to wear out/ the patience of the ingenuous local youth." Since then he has lived steadily in the U.S. (he became a citizen in 1977), teaching, writing and gathering acclaim, including a $208,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation.

Brodsky's success in exile has been based on a comparatively modest output: three books of poems translated into English and a collection of essays, Less Than One, published last year. Yet his imagination, steeped in classical and European traditions, seems familiar and accessible to Western readers. Brodsky is a lyricist of loss, of the slipping away of the past, loved ones, youth; his customary tone is one of passion tempered by hard-earned irony. His poems rely heavily on visual impressions, as in this look at the scenery surrounding a state farm: "The horses, inflated casks/ of ribs trapped between shafts,/ snap at the rusted harrows/ with gnashing profiles." Such concrete images can survive the transition from Russian to English with much of their freshness intact. To write his poems, Brodsky still uses his native language, but he has acquired a formidable, sinuous command of English. He sometimes translates his own works.

Coming in the year of glasnost, Brodsky's Nobel raises the intriguing question of whether he might someday be invited to visit home. Although he never married, he has a son in the Soviet Union whom he has not seen in 15 years. In a sense, though, Brodsky has never left Russia. Its language shapes his thought, and its landscape glitters throughout his poems: "I was raised by the cold that, to warm my palm,/ gathered my fingers around a pen."