Abstract
A page and fire, grain and millstones, / the cutting edge of a poleaxe and a cut-off hair - / God preserves everything; especially words / of forgiveness and love, / as his own voice. / / In them [the words] there beats a lacerated pulse, in them can be heard a crunch of bones, / and a [gravedigger’s] spade in them pounds; flat and somewhat muffled, / since one has only one life, from mortal lips they / sound more clearly than from the cotton wool above this world. / / Great soul, greetings [literally: a bow] from across the seas / for finding them, − to you and to the decayable part of you / which sleeps in [its] native land, [that] thanks to you / acquired the gift of speech amidst a deaf-mute universe.1
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Notes
From ‘Roman Elegies’; Joseph Brodsky, To Urania: Selected Poems, 1965–1985 (London: Viking 1988) p. 66.
So Forth: Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) p. 36.
See Barry Scherr, Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 63, Table 8.
See, for example an interview in Russkaia my si’, no. 3450 (3 February 1983) p. 9.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Loseff, L. (1999). ‘On the Centenary of Anna Akhmatova’. In: Loseff, L., Polukhina, V. (eds) Joseph Brodsky. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373396_12
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