It’s grandeur of design that matters, as Joseph puts it.
(From a letter by Akhmatova)
As the glaze takes into
its upswirling reek
goods, chattels, things unclaimed,
and all before it,
staring into the blue,
into empty features,
into the straitened, clamped
azure of blindness—
as the sepulchral sting
of the Pierides
absorbs the lap of the lagoon,
sight, sound, and aroma,
while trying to fathom
the muteness of the singer
on the edge of
exile, beyond the edge of the end—
Just so, closing his book
the dead one bears off
those last days of autumn
whose name is “with him,”
that tower, that arch,
that wonderful porch,
that square of St. Mark,
where the three of us walked.
Neither friend nor companion
(nor brother? nor other?)
in the jangle of harmonies
of his own melody
holding fast,
like one
who’s already resolved
that life
won’t beguile
and death
will not daunt—
as the wheel
to the helmsman,
as rain to the rider,
as a nook
of earth,
as stars are to travelers:
all passes, all wanes:
Sound is a strange thing: Me-
lchior. Balthazar.
Turnpikes. Uplands.
A cryptic connection,
sound’s a strange grief:
it is serving the Muses.
What was it he sought,
that all-forsaking soul:
the horn that trusted Charlemagne?
Smoke, searching: higher!
O, yes, we were hatched
in other fields
with broken backs
and blind to the living,
under old-style compassion
for such as ourselves
(not the Virgin of Shame:
the dark lumbering mass)—
the forgotten,
and downtrodden.
Those murdered for nothing,
or driven beyond the point of madness …
Death is no Russian world.
How did Paul put it?
Death is a German world
But prison has a Russian accent.
The slave in his galley,
the ogre in chains,
the convict in infinite,
infinite steppe
their longing consign
to the all-burning fire:
higher!
things are unbearable
without it: higher!
that cannibal shame will dine out
on our endless negations,
your knife and your pot.
Like an open cage
to a woodland bird,
like a heart,
ill-disposed to the pull of the earth—
like a raft unfettered
by gravity’s robe.
And who’ll remain fixed
when he is afloat?
This smoke’s not from bonfires,
nor mountain assaults
nor hamlets exhaling
their souls in the gloom,
nor smoldering
cinders, nor torments by fire,
a hundred-armed Shiva.
It staggers at first
its feet thickly wrapped,
it puffs, and it clings and it hides
in the bushes—
and above the destruction
the valleys of tears
O, thanks be to God
—for it kindles at last!
it rises and kneels
like the heart of kings,
the blessed smoke
of earthly altars.
… The sea at evening,
Sappho’s delight,
star after star,
verse after verse …
They no longer recall there
who’s living, who’s not.
The hireling’s exhausted
the oxen unyoked …
What is purer than that
which has burned into nothing?
This: the stars have no number
the vault has no bottom …
Like children playing:
“It’s my turn first!”
on the edge
of the universe, in a land out of sight—
Oblivions poppy,
memorial honey,
the one who goes first
let him take these alone—
to a place where the surf
offers sisters welcome,
where there’s sky and an island
and “sleep, my dear”!
Translated by Robert Reid
Authors note: As the reader will immediately notice, this piece is modeled on Akhmatova’s “Through all of Earth”; Tsvetaeva’s devices are also discernible. I wanted these two Russian muses to participate in verse dedicated to Brodsky. Brodsky himself, in his verses on the death of T. S. Eliot, took W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” as his model.