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.
By David Selzer