Leningrad

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.