Joseph Brodsky

(autotranslated, could have mistakes)

Image removed from public review package. Local review only · not public no-info · normal_img.bibo_.kz_.jpeg From the interview with Joseph Brodsky. Man in a landscape

Eugene Rein: Was he a lighthouse keeper?

Joseph Brodsky: Of course, he was a lighthouse keeper. I don’t remember what year it was, maybe fifty-eighth. It was a lighthouse at the exit from the Leningrad port. It ended quite disastrously: the fireman there loved naval order, and we didn’t get along with him.

In some of Brodsky's poems he mentions the lighthouse

EXCERPT

At the Hanseatic Anchor Hotel,

where flies land on sugar,

where sideways in the deep canal

destroyers sail past the windows,

I was sitting in the company of a circle,

staring at the masts and cannons

and your conscience from reproach

saving Cahors with a bottle.

The music thundered at the dances,

soldiers boarded the transport,

bending the cloth hips.

The lighthouse winked at them cheerfully. 

And often to the point of pain in the back of my head

about the similarity between it and the bottle

I thought deprived by the regime

familiarization with its contents.

Having entered East Prussia,

your image, in lowered eyelids,

from our Baltic swamps

I smuggled it like opium.

And in the evening, with a sad face,

I went down to the quay wall

in the company of nimble thoughts,

and you performed on the waves...

May 1964

ELEGY

A. G. Naiman

One day this southern town

was the place where I met with a friend;

we were both young and we met

assigned to each other on the pier,

built in ancient times; from books

we knew about its existence.

Many waves have broken since then.

My friend on land choked on shallow food,

but with his own bitter lies; and I

went on a journey.

And here I am again

I'm standing here this evening. Nobody

didn't meet me. Yes, and myself

I have no one to tell: come

there and then.

The screams of seagulls.

The splash of breaking waves.

**The lighthouse whose tower attracts the eye

more of a photographer than a sailor. **

I stand alone on an ancient stone,

my sadness does not desecrate antiquity -

aggravates. Apparently the earth

truly round since you come

to where there is nothing but

memories.

1968(?), Yalta

UNFINISHED

Friend, gravitating towards hidden forms of flattery

who knows - like a sober person

heavy thoughts about death

prefers talk about illness -

me, polluting life like a draft

further dreams, your address is on the envelope

I dry you with my flu-like steam,

to achieve contagious strength

my chemical letters could

and so that, clinging to pauses and pores

raw sheets, I still want

landscape of the winter Black Sea bay,

described later, was embodied

in that instance of the white world,

where are you, opposing violence

Chukhon cold with a sprig of thyrsus,

when you feel a sore throat

rinse your mouth with Attic salt.

Winter has crossed the mountains

like a climber with a heavy backpack,

and the snow lies on the stunted dodder,

as if waiting for Leander Gero,

green Pont with salty tongue

kisses the hem of a melting tunic,

but the maiden waits and does not change her position.

**Asian wind, extinguishing the lighthouse

on the tower in Sest, slamming the gate**

and at night he stirs up the roses,

in the garden on the slope fell into tetanus,

rumbles with an overturned watering can

down the steps, past the cineraria,

exclamation mark turning into a sign

question, oppresses acacia; two cats,

who made up my entire bestiary,

dive into the cellar and are tormented by the sound

in an empty glass of a rattling spoon.

Tap dancing shutters, squealing, chaos.

It seems like a swimmer

moored in the wrong place and wanders backwards

to your beloved. Groaning and cursing,

in the next house there is a widower general

lets the dog in. And in the next house

a loaded shot sticks out of the window

gun. And the sea is far below

breaks his ribs with the pole of a pier,

engulfing the entire shaft with its mane.

And the garden is hobbled with cords of vines.

And feeling the absence of a verb

to express an impossible thought

about the reason why not

Leandra, Gero - or snow, which is the same,

slides into the water, and you see after

how the slow dawn illuminates

her steamy bed.

But it's a windy night, and the nights

are different from each other, just like the days.

And sometimes everything looks different.

Sometimes it’s so quiet, in short,

that you hear the sighs of the flounder at the bottom,

what reaches the pioneer dacha

the overseas creaking of a Turkish mattress.

So quiet that a distant star

shimmering as a compromise

with the ink of night vitriol,

able to hear the rustling of a blackbird

in green cypress hair.

And I, who writes these lines,

in the quiet creak of the eternal pen,

crawling through cells in the twilight,

just recently aspired to be a prophet,

I hear the voice of my yesterday,

and my hair falls into my hands.

Friend, honor space! Time is not a barrier

the invasion of cold and the hum of blizzards.

I was again convinced that nature

true to herself and, stunned by the buzz,

I left the North and fled to the South

in the green, native time of year.

1970

Post aetatem nostram

VII

Tower

Cool afternoon.

Lost somewhere in the clouds

iron spire of the municipal tower

appears at the same time

**  lightning rod, beacon and place

raising the national flag. **

Inside there is a prison.

It was once calculated that usually...

in the satrapies, during the time of the pharaohs,

among Muslims, in the era of Christianity -

imprisoned or executed

approximately six percent of the population.

Therefore, a hundred years ago

the grandfather of the current Caesar conceived

justice reform. By canceling

immoral custom of the death penalty,

he with the help of a special law

those six percent were reduced to two,

obliged to go to prison, of course,

for life. It doesn't matter whether you did it

are you a crime or innocent;

the law is essentially like a tax.

It was then that this Tower was erected.

The blinding shine of chrome steel.

On the forty-third floor there is a shepherd,

sticking his face through the porthole,

sends his smile down

the dog that came to visit him.

------

And the splashes, like midges, fly towards the lighthouse fire,

To return again to the cold, angry foam.

The lighthouse is like a candle in the hand of an old man,

Who measures the steps inside him with coils,

Slowly but surely moving up the stairs.

I. Brodsky