WINTERING IN VENICE
The exiled Russian poet, Josef Brodsky,
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,
whom the Soviet authorities
had forced to ’emigrate’ permanently,
taught at various colleges in the States,
and usually spent his Christmas/New Year
vacations in Venice, a city
that reminded him of his native
Leningrad – previously and now
St Petersburg. Tzar Peter the Great
had canalised the Ladoga marshes
to build a northern city emulating,
perhaps outdoing, La Serenissima.
The American poet, Ezra Pound –
self-exiled to Venice, claiming he feared
the electric chair if he had returned
after the war to the States – was buried
in the Protestant Cemetery
on the island of San Michele, along
with consuls and admirals, and, in time,
Brodsky himself, a descendant of revered
rabbis become a Christian convert.
One winter’s night, Brodsky, with his then lover,
the American Jewish polymath
Susan Sontag – who, years later, would stage
‘Waiting for Godot’ in a candle-lit
theatre in besieged Sarajevo –
visited Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s widow,
in her apartment near La Salute,
a church built as a votive offering
for the city’s once more surviving the plague.
With Gaudier-Brzeka’s hieratic
bust of the poet standing a yard tall
in a far corner of the room, they listened,
for two hours, as patiently as they
were able, to the widow’s rehearsed defence
of her late husband – “He had a Jewish name…
and Jewish friends…” – declined more tea, and left.
A few years after this encounter Brodsky
had open heart surgery in New York,
and later, two bypass operations.
He remained a heavy smoker, and died,
aged 55, from a heart attack
in his Brooklyn Height’s apartment.
The coffin was flown in the cargo-hold to Venice –
‘A drowning city, where suddenly the dry
light of reason dissolves in the moisture
of the eye’ – and, from Marco Polo airport,
taken by water-hearse to San Michele.
Homesick for his family and city
this unselfpitying, bilingual
genius in his writings about Venice,
poetry and prose, frequently mentions
the wintry fogs that rise on the lagoon,
and drift along the canals, and soften
the pillars of arcades, and baffle
the echoing sounds of distant footfalls…
…’A tin can launched skyward
with the tip of a shoe goes sailing
out of sight, and a minute later
there is still no sound of it falling on
wet sand. Or, for that matter, a splash’.
Note: see also EZRA POUND IN VENICE.
Ian Craine
March 29, 2024I restrained myself – they are all so good, a wonderful collection. The apercus, the obiter dicta like the performance of ‘Waiting for Godot’ in Sarajevo. I shall return to them.
Something else comes to mind, a book I suspect you also know – ‘Ostend’ by Volker Weidermann; Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and others in exile, from the summer of 1936.
Mary Clark
March 29, 2024All the inter-connectedness, though we manage to destroy it with viral ideas about government, leadership, country, religion, and so on. Also another connection: Dante is supposed to have died due to malaria contracted in Venice or the marshlands outside the city.
Harvey Lillywhite
April 7, 2024Thanks for the poem. In 1979, getting an MFA in writing, I edited Columbia University’s literary magazine. Brodsky and Derek Walcott, who were friends, taught us there and read at the annual benefit reading to support the magazine. Brodsky had memorized his long poems and delivered them in Russian and English. But both of them read from Pound’s Cantos. A favorite patch was from Canto 81:
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.