dwutygodnik - strona kultury

BY Irena Grudzińska-Gross

On 28 January, a large group of Brodsky’s friends, acquaintances, admirers and distant relatives met in the Russian Samovar, a restaurant on West 52nd street in New York

He died unexpectedly fifteen years ago. He was fifty-five years old. Yes, he was sick, very sick with heart disease. But his vitality, the strength of his convictions, the speed with which he delivered his pronouncements made one believe that he would live many more years. His death was a shock. This shock is still with us.

On January 28, a large group of Brodsky’s friends, acquaintances, admirers and distant relatives met in the Russian Samovar, a restaurant on West 52nd street in New York. The owner of the restaurant, Roman Kaplan, an old Leningrad friend of Brodsky, expects people to come to his restaurant twice a year to commemorate Brodsky – on his birthday (May 25) and the day of his death (January 28). And people do come, Brodsky’s contemporaries, ever more gray. The occasion is always very sad; the group looks quite forlorn, as if unjustly punished. And Kaplan, the master of ceremonies, each year sounds angrier than the year before.

There is a microphone, and people get up and say a few words, read some poems, their own or “Iosif’s”. The language is predominantly Russian, rarely breaking into English. We always listen to a breathy sounding tape as Brodsky reads his poems. They bring a very personal note into the room. With other voices sounding later on, that personal note fades away. It is sad. The voice is heard, the vitality is missing. It is as if Brodsky were singing his own elegy.

How can one commemorate a dead poet? Churches are for everybody, restaurants even more so. Small multi-denominational chapels, like the Saarinen chapel at MIT campus? No, only an intimate reading of poems will do, to oneself or one other person. Or listening to his voice on a tape, over and over. But even such celebrations are sadly unfulfilling. His voice is still here, but without the density that accompanies life. His self, in words of Mark Strand (in “In Memory of Joseph Brodsky”),

Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust

Hence that grayness, dusty grayness in the long room of the Russian Samovar’s upstairs. And the solid immobility of Brodsky’s portraits. His voice, though, reminded me of that Strand poem, especially of its ending:

…What remains of the self unwinds

Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile

And the future no more than et cetera et cetera … but fast and forever.

With this “et cetera et cetera” Strand reproduced the voice of Brodsky better than a tape could. His fast running after another thought, skipping of parts of sentences and thus cheating time. Time, of which he never had enough, and which, empty of him, stretches now forever.

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In Memory of Joseph Brodsky
by Mark Strand

It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self
Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads
To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through;
That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,
And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable,
Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain
That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep.
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph,
Dear Joseph, those sudden reminders of your having been – the places
And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear
Like ghosts in your wake. What remains of the self unwinds
Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile
And the future no more than et cetera et cetera ... but fast and forever.