♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -When I was dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College, I decided I was going to try to hire Joseph Brodsky.

I said, "How much does Columbia pay you?"

And he told me.

It wasn't very much.

And I said we'd pay him twice that.

And he said, "Why you do that?"

I said, "Because you're gonna win the Nobel Prize."

And then he said, "How you know that?

Only I know that."

[ Applause ] -In 1987, the poet Joseph Brodsky won the Nobel Prize as an American for a body of poetic work written mostly in Russian.

♪♪ In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, publishing poetry without state permission was a crime.

♪♪ For Brodsky, as a Soviet Jew, the writing of poetry was fraught with special peril.

-The state defined truth, and the poets were the people who attempted to keep truth alive.

-Poetry was like dynamite.

♪♪ -Although nothing in Brodsky's poetry was explicitly political, in 1964, at age 23, he was arrested and tried as a social parasite and then sentenced to five years in the Arctic.

♪♪ Outcry, including from the West, got him released after 18 months.

But in 1972, Brodsky was told to leave the Soviet Union and never return.

♪♪ -He was embraced by Americans as somebody who demonstrated how much better our system is.

It was a very Cold War story.

This man was oppressed there, but he comes to us, where we embrace him.

But he always resisted this idea that his story was about that.

His story was about being an artist.

-To explore how this poet, exiled by one state, exalted by another, kept faith with his art, I asked seven interpreters to read two Brodsky poems -- one written before Brodsky's flight to America and one after, but both exploring the force of time and the way that time inevitably separates us from what we thought life would be.

We began with "Six Years Later."

Written in Russian, the poem's title suggests a backward look at something, someone already lost.

A dedication to "M.B."

hints at the nature of that loss.

♪♪ [ Thunder rumbles ] -"So long had life together been that now the second of January fell again on Tuesday, making her astonished brow lift like a windshield wiper in the rain, so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed a cloudless distance waiting up the road."

♪♪ -The windshield.

It looks like the brow of the woman, and when she frowns, it moves a little bit.

-Not even her face.

Just her brow almost separated from her face.

That is a very beautiful image.

♪♪ -With that first startling image where a lifting brow clears the windshield of rain, Brodsky transports us into a long tradition of love poetry, where nature itself responds to the feelings of lovers.

♪♪ -"So long had life together been that once the snow began to fall, it seemed unending that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince, I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending not to believe that cherishing of eyes, would beat against my palm like butterflies."

♪♪ -This sensation, like, him covering the eyes of his beloved and feeling the eyelashes scratching gently against his palm like it was a butterfly.

-These metaphors embed this kind of erotic magic in a daily event.

[ Thunder rumbles ] -The master of the erotic love poem most influencing the young Brodsky was the 17th-century English metaphysical poet John Donne.

Brodsky had, in fact, begun learning English in order to translate Donne.

-Brodsky really believed that poets throughout time were in touch with each other.

-Donne's influence is first apparent in Brodsky's approach to rhyme.

-It was a trait of metaphysical poetry to rhyme incompatible things, to couple the impossible.

-Joseph modernized rhyme so it became more flexible.

The rhymes are less exact, but they're also more suggestive.

So, to rhyme "once" and "wince" is just fantastically beautiful.

A rhyme that's exact emphasizes a point.

An inexact rhyme introduces an element of doubt or uncertainty or skepticism.

♪♪ -Brodsky was very adamant when he came to America that none of it should be translated in free verse.

The music has to be preserved.

♪♪ -In the American poet Richard Wilbur, Brodsky found a translator who would preserve the musicality of the poem and the suggestiveness of the rhymes.

-"So alien had all novelty become that sleep's entanglement would put to shame whatever depths the analysts might plumb; that when my lips blew out the candle flame, her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought to join my own, without another thought."

-In this stanza, the rhymes grow more assertive, more exact, as if insisting on love's power to transcend all disruption.

It is also in this stanza, in that erotic image of entangled lovers, that we begin to see Brodsky's even more profound debt to Donne in his use of extended metaphors called "conceits."

♪♪ In line 26 of a famous 36-line poem, Donne compared two lovers to two legs of a triangular compass who, though separate, are always joined.

♪♪ In precisely line 26 of his 36-line poem, Brodsky reveals that his work, too, is governed by the triangle.

-Nothing of this extended metaphor ever existed in Russian poetry.

♪♪ -Triangles will become a recurring motif in Brodsky's work, including in the sketches and doodles that crowd the margins of his notebooks.

-I wonder at which point in the poem -- or maybe it's the first thought, was the thought of the triangle.

You know?

"Okay.

I'm going to do a triangle now.

Uh, let's see."

♪♪ -In the first section, the windshield wiper in the rain clears her sadness momentarily.

-And the butterflies make triangles, too.

-The triangle is understood architecturally to be the most solid basis of, you know, construction.

-The entangled limbs and tight rhymes of this stanza fuse the lovers, but translator Richard Wilbur enmeshes them even further with soft consonant sounds -- fluttering, flames, plumb, lips, depths -- that sustain the erotic motion of butterflies and lead us into the bursting forth of lush natural imagery in the next stanza.

♪♪ -"So long had life together been that all that tattered brood of papered roses went, and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall, and we had money, by some accident, and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days, the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze."

[ Sea bird crying ] -The first stanza has a sense of rain in it, a windshield wiper, you know?

The second stanza has snow beginning to fall.

And then it moves forward into a hot season.

It seems they made a getaway.

-But at the same time, what's going on here is a removal from normal time.

♪♪ -In some way, he is capturing how time feels being in love.

The poem begins when they've already been together forever.

[ Thunder rumbles ] "So long had life together been that all..." "So long had life together been without..." "So long had life together been that she..." -The poem gets smaller and smaller.

First they're out in the car, then they're outside, then you're in the room with its wallpaper.

And then it's the bed.

The indication is that the universe had become so about them that -- that time had stopped happening.

♪♪ -"Stanza" in Italian means "room."

And Brodsky has been demonstrating all along how the poetic stanza may itself form a chamber of perfect privacy, shutting out all realities.

♪♪ -In a Soviet city, you were never alone.

You lived in a communal apartment with your parents and a bunch of people you hadn't chosen to live with.

-They will give you one room, and then you would live with 10 other strangers.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -So this vision of solitude is like an impossible, dreamt-of idyll.

♪♪ -"So long had life together been without books, chairs, utensils -- only that ancient bed-- that the triangle, before it came about, had been a perpendicular, the head of some acquaintance hovering above two points which had been coalesced by love."

♪♪ -When I was doing my interview with him for The Paris Review and I said, "Well, you dedicate all these beautiful poems to M.B.

Who is M.B.?"

And he got very -- He said "M.B.

is M.B.!"

You know, full stop.

[ Chuckles ] -Marina Basmanova was a painter.

She basically rejected Brodsky.

She was one of the few women who rejected him, and he couldn't get over it.

-There are these ominous hints.

You know, like, so, in the first section, the windshield wiper in the rain clears her sadness momentarily.

And then in the second, her eyelashes are beating against his palm like butterflies, and there's a feeling of escape, you know, that the butterflies are restless.

I think the triangle also is another little hint of -- [ Chuckles ] of bad things to come.

A triangle in a love situation is not to be sought.

♪♪ -And then there is the head of an acquaintance, who we probably know who it is.

It's the poet who took Marina Basmanova away from Brodsky.

♪♪ -The unity of the love is reinforced with every stanza.

Then it's like the train on full speed...

It derails.

♪♪ -"So how long had life together been that she and I, with our joint shadows, had composed a double door, a door which, even if we were lost in work or sleep, was always closed; somehow its halves were split and we went right through them into the future, into night."

♪♪ -It ends with the door -- the door kind of splitting open and creates the triangle.

♪♪ -Opening doors and also the shadow.

All of these angles become this kind of shifting conceit for the breakage of the relationship.

-The tragedy and the beauty is in the fact that everything is perishable and mortal.

♪♪ -There isn't an anti-Soviet word in any of his poetry, but it's terribly anti-Soviet because at the center of it is the bourgeois ego.

♪♪ You prize your experience.

You prize your individuality above the State.

♪♪ -Brodsky's temperament as an artist was linked to this self-identification as individual.

♪♪ -In "Six Years Later", Brodsky had summoned poetic tradition to preserve the individual experience of romantic love.

20 years later, Brodsky uses the classical image of the centaur -- half man, half horse -- as a metaphor for the alienation and separateness that individuals may suffer.

♪♪ -Brodsky wrote a great essay that spelled a lot of this out called "The Condition We Call Exile" about how being in exile magnified what he would have called the existential condition of his writing.

-When he writes "Epitaph for a Centaur" in English in 1988, Brodsky is a celebrated American, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize, and a few years from being named U.S.

Poet Laureate.

But in this poem, too, we feel time closing in on the present.

-I get the sense in this poem Brodsky, as the poet centaur, is standing over his own tomb, speaking his own funeral oration, lamenting his own isolation.

-"To say that he was unhappy is either to say too much or too little: depending on who's the audience.

Still, the smell he'd give off was a bit too odious, and his canter was also quite hard to match."

♪♪ -The slightly romantic image of the poet is not fitting in and being outcast.

This was very much the case of a poet or any intellectual in the Soviet Russia, and especially if you're a Jew.

And Brodsky was a Jew.

-He undoubtedly would have felt it in numerous ways.

The Jewish population was really terrorized.

There was widespread fear that they were all going to be deported to concentration camps in the Far East.

They weren't the only ones.

Ukrainian culture, Polish culture.

Any culture except for Soviet culture.

But the Jews in particular.

♪♪ -"Still, the smell he'd give off was a bit too odious."

-He could be very self-deprecating in poetry.

He talks about his teeth, his balding head.

So it's a very daring rhyme -- "audience," "odious."

-The word "odious" also has something to do with the non-poetic nature of this poem.

It's not polished.

It's not beautiful.

-When you just listen to how the rhymes are falling and sometimes how clunkily they fall.

"The economy," "they befriended the enemy."

"Probability," "immobility."

-It's purposefully out of step from the way that poetry is read and received.

♪♪ -Another centaur is the American and the Russian person, that he was something that was thrown together that wasn't meant to be together.

-He was Americanized, but he never lost his Russian-ness.

When I say Russia, it's also Russian.

It's the language that might be the centaur.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -He had a sorrowful, resonant vibrato.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -He wouldn't stand there and read.

He would be going from memory.

He'd throw his head back, sometimes close his eyes.

You'd feel this just pouring out of him.

-It was like he was in a trance or he was like a cantor.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -"Still, the smell he'd give off was a bit too odious, and his canter was also quite hard to match."

-You know, there's his love of often atrocious puns, which he just thought were just so great and funny.

[ Cantor singing in Russian ] -A poem can be incantatory on the same scale as a cantor in a synagogue... and simultaneously be droll and wry and sardonic and humorous.

♪♪ -"He said, They meant just a monument, but something went astray: the womb?

the assembly line?

the economy?

Or else, the war never happened, they befriended the enemy, and he was left as it is, presumably to portray Intransigence, Incompatibility -- that sort of thing which proves not so much one's uniqueness or virtue, but probability."

Uniqueness would be the bourgeois ego, but probability is much more the Soviet person.

In other words, there's nothing unique about you.

Someone like you, you're -- you're a probability factor.

-He comes from an environment in which a monument is usually suspect.

-The Soviets are all about heroes.

There was a whole museum in Moscow devoted to heroes of tomatoes and heroes of raising rabbits.

-Also, when there's the word "monument," you know that it's about a poet because, for Russians, that is what a poet is.

You know, a poet becomes a monument.

-I mean, he won the Nobel Prize, for goodness' sakes, so they did make him into a monument.

-There's a tension there, too, because the State's appropriation of the image of the poet to advance its own national identity, he's interrogating that.

-When a poet becomes a monument, there is something a little bit freakish and sad about it, too.

♪♪ -"For years resembling a cloud, he wandered in olive groves, marveling at one-leggedness, the mother of immobility."

-The reference here is to Wordsworth.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud."

So, here we've got the cloud, which is English literature, and the olive groves, which is classical literature.

-He's clearly someone who has read deeply and widely in classical culture.

He would know the origin story of centaurs arising from a cloud.

♪♪ So he's in the ancient mythological past that lived on in the imaginations of the Greeks and then through poets like Wordsworth.

♪♪ -The Soviet ideology was demanding that poetry serve the State and celebrate certain values.

And what Brodsky cherished was values that transcended time and space.

-Brodsky believes that we have always, as a people inhabiting this planet, needed to be in constant touch with the gods.

And poetry is the language where they, over time, have always left messages for us.

-"Learned to lie to himself, and turned it into an art for want of a better company, also to check his sanity.

And he died fairly young -- because his animal part turned out to be less durable than his humanity."

♪♪ -He'd had open heart surgery when he was in his thirties, so he's probably conscious of his own mortality.

This part really is touching to me, even if he's being playful in it.

In every direction, there's a road to isolation in this life.

"Learning to lie to himself."

♪♪ -I don't ever see Joseph imagining that what he was doing was lying to himself because I think quite the opposite is true.

He bore witness to the dark and turned it into an art.

♪♪ -There's a big turn in the final couplet.

"He died fairly young -- because his animal part turned out to be less durable than his humanity."

-He had a heart problem, and he predicted his own death.

So the poem was an epitaph to himself.

-Centaurs -- the perfect emblem of the animal and the human, which I think by the end of the poem translates into sort of body and soul.

-In refining one's individuality, one's selfness, in something that lasts, that defies time, a poem encases humanity in something that can continue.

♪♪ "He died fairly young."

Well -- [ Chuckles ] He's -- He hasn't died.

You are reading this poem, so it becomes a vehicle for the preservation of his humanity.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪