Joseph Brodsky in York

In a previous blogpost I wrote about my writer's tryst, where I spent time working with my MA thesis this summer. Of course, no work can be properly done without the sufficient amount of leisure so in-between work I relaxed with a book of verses by Joseph Brodsky, well, two actually. These books were selected translations in Norwegian, beautifully crafted, and I was of course immediately taken with Brodsky's elegy for W. H. Auden, particularly because it evokes my beloved city of York, Auden's birthplace. This poem is a part of a sequence titled In England and it is taken from Collected Poems in English, a book in the series Oxford Poets by Carcanet (2001). The poems in this book have been translated either by Brodsky alone or in cooperation with others. It is not specified which alternative applies for In England.

York: In Memoriam W. H. Auden

The butterflies of northern England dance above the goosefoot

below the brick wall of a dead factory. After Wednesday

comes Thursday, and so on. The sky breathes heat;

the fields burn. The towns give off a smell of striped

cloth, long-wrapped and musty; dahlias die of thirst.

And your voice - "I have known three great poets. Each

one a prize son of a bitch" - sounds in my ears

with disturbing clarity. I slow my steps

and turn to look round. Four years soon

since you died in an Austrian hotel. Under the crossing sign

not a soul: tiled roofs, asphalt, limestone,

poplars. Chester died, too - you know that

only too well. Like beads on a dusty abacus,

sparrows sit solemnly on wires. Nothing so much

transforms a familiar entrance into a crowd of columns

as love for a man, especially when

he's dead. The absence of wind compels taut leaves

to tense their muscles and stir against their will.

The white butterflies' dance is like a storm-tossed ship.

A man takes his own blind alley with him wherever he goes

about the world; and a bent knee, with its obtuse angle,

multiplies the captive perspective,

like a wedge of cranes holding their course

for the south. Like all things moving onward.

The emptiness, swallowing sunlight - something in common with

the hawthorn - grows steadily more palpable

in the outstretched hand's direction, and

the world merges into a long street where others live.

In this sense, it is England. England, in this sense,

still an empire and fully capable - if

you believe the music gurgling like water -

of ruling waves. Or any element, for that matter.

Lately, I've been losing my grip a little: snarl

at my shopwindow reflection; while my finger

dials its number, my hand lets the phone fall.

Closing my eyes, I see an empty boat,

motionless, far out in the bay.

Coming out of the phone booth,

I hear a starling's voice - in its cry alarm.

But before it flies away the sound

melts in the air. Whose blue expanse, innocent of objects,

is much like this life here (where things stand out more in the desert),

for you're not here. And vacuum gradually

fills the landscape. Like flecks of foam,

sheep take their ease on bottle-green waves

of Yorkshire heather. The corps de ballet of nimble

butterflies, taking their cue from an unseen bow,

flicker above a grass-grown ditch, giving the eye

no point of rest. And the willow herb's vertical stalk

is no longer than the ancient Roman road,

heading north, forgotten by all at Rome.

Subtracting the greater from the lesser - time from man -

you get words, the remainder, standing out against their

white background more clearly than the body

ever manages to while it lives, though it cry "Catch me!" -

thus the source of love turns into the object of love.