Abstract
In “Letter to Horace”, an essay published in the year before he died, Joseph Brodsky, or his narrator, describes an erotic dream-encounter with a strange body that resembles a lover's he once knew in Rome. This body represents Roman poetry, whose appeal lies in its formal excellence and historical importance, but especially Horace's, which attracts Brodsky because of its metrical variety. Horace stands out for his power to surprise a reader through the manipulation, or recreation, of language. Brodsky’s account of Horace’s poetry (as well as of Virgil's and Ovid’s) advances a set of ideas that appear in his other writing: that language issues from the inanimate; that a poet does not select from language so much as language chooses a poet, “and thereby accomplishes world-historical (evolutionary) goals of its own;” that the fruit of this evolution is beauty; and that lyric poetry is “a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one’s soul: winnowing it from the chaff of existence.”
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Brodsky's “Letter to Horace” appears in his collection of essays, On Grief and Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 428–58. Hereafter, the essay will also (in the footnotes) be abbreviated as LH.
J. M. Coetzee, “Speaking for Language”, The New York Review of Books, XLIII, 2 February 1, 1996, 31.
LH 439.
Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization”, in his collection of essays, Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 130.
Ibid., 131.
J. Brodsky, “Wooing the Inanimate”, On Grief and Reason, 321.
Coetzee, 29.
J. Brodsky, “An Immodest Proposal,” On Grief and Reason, 207.
LH 457. To be sure, Brodsky's personal experience of the Soviet prison system this reference to the tapping of messages “like inmates in an institution.” Brodsky also uses the condition to the tapping of messages “like inmates in an institution”. Brodsky also uses the condition of prisoners in his play, Marbles (1989), as a metaphor for the confinement of two characters, Tullius and Publius, within a totalitarian future, or alternatively in a restrictive poetic tradition burdened by the “marbles” of a classical past.
Coetzee, 30.
J. Brodsky, “Altra Ego,” On Grief and Reason, 87. Compare what Brodsky writes in his introduction to Aleksander Kushner's Apollo in the Snow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), xii: “Poetry is essentially the soul's search for its release in language.”
David MacFadyen, Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), 192–193.
“Twilight of the Idols”, as quoted by Joseph Farrell in Latin Language and Latin Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 115. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Was ich den Alten verdanke,” 1 (Werke, eds. Giorgio Colli-Mazzino Montinari, VI, vol. 3 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969], 148 f.): “Bis heute habe ich an keinem Dichter dasselbe artistische Entzücken gehabt, das mir von Anfang an eine Horazische Ode gab. In gewissen Sprachen ist Das, was hier erreicht ist, nicht einmal zu wollen. Dies Mosaik von Worten, wo jedes Wort als Klang, als Ort, als Begriff, nach rechts und links und über das Ganze hin seine Kraft ausströmt, dies minimum in Umfang und Zahl der Zeichen, dies damit erzielte maximum in der Energie der Zeichen-das Alles ist römisch und, wenn man mir glauben will, vornehmpar excellence.”
LH 431.—Cf. Suetonius, De poetis, frg. XXVIII, p. 47 in C.Suetonius Tranquillus, Praeter Caesarum libros reliquiae, ed. A. Reifferscheid (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1860; repr. Hildesheim-New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), p. 47.
LH 435–36.
I think especially of an image that appeared in The New York Times (Tuesday, July 15, 2003, Section B1) in an article on a group of photography exhibitions in London during that summer—one was a retrospective of Bourdin's work. The image I have in mind is of a woman's lower body and legs, in red mini-skirt and dress-heels, stretched out on a red couch. That is all one sees of her, because her torso disappears behind the couch, and into the space between couch and wall. The similarity to the figure in Brodsky's dream is striking. I do not want to press the comparison, however, but only to acknowledge a marked feature of Brodsky's style in the essay “Letter to Horace” that is typified not just by the voyeuristic quality of the dream, but high and low, a free-ranging attitude that conveys a certain tone and a certain Euro-American intellectual style, a kind of Sontag-strut, even as Brodsky is discussing the ‘pearls of Horace.” This is redolent of what Derek Walcott says of Brodsky's approach to the classics, “He chews and swallows the past audibly… but of course this vulgarity is an act” (“Magic Industry,” in Walcott's collection of essays, What the Twilight Says [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], 140).
Brodsky does not attribute to euphony all of Horace's ability to surprise. Speaking at one point in the voice of Horace's Greek lyric predecessors, Brodsky says, “Yeah, we're impressed. That's why your lines are so twisted with enjambments and qualifiers, that's why your argument is so unpredictable” (LH 440). One should not assume, having read in “Roman Elegies” the phrase, “cold pearls of Horace,” that Brodsky failed to see that Horace knew, like Thomas Hardy, how to “roughen” a line in order to impart to the poetic argument an unpredictable turn. Such roughening appears in 3.6, the last Roman ode, when Horace anticipates the good offices of the institor in the seduction of the young Roman wife. The invocation of Libitina in the great capstone ode, 3.30, is another such stroke. There is also a superb example in 4.13: “Quid habes illius, illius,/quae sprabat, amores,/quae me surpuerat mihi …?” (“What do you still retain of that one, that one who breathed love itself, who stole me from myself?”) The colloquialism of surpuerat represents a shift from formal diction, as if the speaker were to shed pomposity for a moment, becoming least himself, i.e. his public self, and thus vulnerable, even in addressing that old love, Lyce.
For a different reading of the structure of the final two stanzas of 2.9, see Ellen Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 113–14.
LH 447.
Ibid. LH 447.
LH 443.
LH 452, 454. Cf. T. Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207.
Italo Calvino, “Ovid and Universal Contiguity,” in his collection of essays, The Literature Machine (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987; repr. London: Vintage, 1997), 147. Cf. Ziolkowski, 171.
“Wooing the Inanimate,” 333.
Derek Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), Poem IX.
“An Immodest Proposal,” 207.
LH 455–56.
Robert Tracy, “Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder,” in Osip Mandelstam, Stone, translated and introduced by R. T. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19.
See in note 11. J. Brodsky, “Altra Ego,” On Grief and Reason, 87. Compare what Brodsky writes in his introduction to Aleksander Kushner's Apollo in the Snow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991)
“The Child of Civilization,” 128.
Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 201.
J. Brodsky, So Forth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 72.
J. Brodsky, To Urania (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 69.
For a discussion of this elegy in relation to a Catullan antecedent and to the themes of poetic creation, life and death, and immortality, see Michael von Albrecht, “Catull: Ein Dichter mit europäischer Ausstrahlung,” in von Albrecht's Literatur als Brücke: Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte und Komparatistik, Spudasmata 90 (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003), 36–39. (I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase for Kindly bringing this work of von Albrecht's to my attention.)
Volkov, Conversations, 200. David Cronenberg, once, asked whether his film, The Fly (1986), served as a metaphor of the AIDS epidemic, has said recently in radio interview that he responded that it served rather as a metaphor of the process of aging, inevitable and universal (NPR's Fresh Air, October 3, 2005). So it would seem that Brodsky here does the reverse, by inscribing within an elegiac sequence which meditates, on aging and mortality the particular loss of a beloved friend to AIDS.
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Hofmeister, T.P. Joseph Brodsky’s roman body. Int class trad 12, 81–93 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-005-0011-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-005-0011-6