[A. E. Stallings]

Has anyone else been following the Brodsky bru-ha-ha in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement)?

It started with an essay/review by Lachlan Mackinnon on Brodsky's English poetry, titled "A break from dullness: the virtues of Brodsky's English verse" (June 22, 2001). Basically it was an appreciation of Brodsky's English poetry, but also a defense against critics, in particular Craig Raine, who, while granting he may be great in Russian, have declared he is basically, well, incompetent when it comes to English. He has described him as a "world-class mediocrity".

I agree somewhat with both sides myself. Brodsky's work is rarely, if ever, dull, which is surely a virtue. But then, when it is clunky, one does wonder if it is deliberate, or the result of not being a native speaker. Even Heaney, in his elegy for Brodsky, "Audenesque", writes, albeit affectionately:

Nevermore that rush to pun
Or to hurry through all yon
Jammed emjambements piling up
As you went above the top,

Nose in air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car
You hijacked when you robbed its bank
(Russian was your reserve tank)

etc.

But what has been interesting in the back-and-forth letters in the aftermath of the article, is a few heated side skirmishes about prosody.

The poem in question is:

"To the President-elect"

You've climbed the mountain. At its top
the mountain and the climbing stop.
A peak is where the climber finds
his biggest step is not mankind's.

Proud of your stamina and craft
you stand there being photographed
transfixed between nowhere-to-go
And us who give you vertigo.

Well, strike your tent and have your lunch
before you stir an avalanche
of brand-new taxes whose each cent
will mark the speed of your descent.

According to Mackinnon's original article:

What makes this more than just a piece of neatly turned occasional verse is what Brodsky does with the rhymes. The first two ("top...stop") are assertively monosyllabic. As we move on, though, Brodsky starts to rhme words of unequal length and to introduce slant rhymes. At the end, we have a rhyme ("cent...descent") which becomes, thanks to the rhythmic variation of the penultimate line, almost inaudible. The more so, as "cent" seems to echo "tent" two lines above. This use of rhyme clearly owes something to the practice of W. H. Auden in a poem like "A Permanent Way". Here, the form of the poem, its initial clarity gradually fraying, mimics the political process it describes.


Me: (Well, I won't argue here about the rimes... to me, the only truly slant rime is lunch/avalanche. Craft/photographed would have been countenanced as a true rime even by Byron--it just looks off. to-go and tigo, and cent/scent are rime riche. But that is neither here nor there...)

The issue becomes the "rhythmic variation" of the penultimate line.

Craig Raine's letter of the next week asserts:

In Brodsky's "To the President Elect", thrice was I particularly worried. First, "whose each cent" is a Brodskyism for "whose every cent". Second, "Well, strike your tent and have your lunch": the seqeunce should be, have your lunch, then strike your tent. Unless Brodsky thinks "strike" and "pitch" are synonyms. If not, "have your lunch" is redundant--there only to provide a rhyme for "avalanche". His English is so wonky it's difficult to be certain. Third, the clunky approximate tetrameter, "of brand-new taxes whose each cent". It passes--but only just, inelegantly. Still, if Lachlan Mackinnon (who scans as well as Brodsky) can't immediately see that "To the President Elect" is a definitively mediocre dud, then he is beyond all rational help.

Lachlan Mackinnon's reply, the following week:

First, the phrase "whose each cent" which Raine calls a "Brodskyism". OED first records this usage of "each in 1598 ("The bodyes each-sicknesse") and, in 1615 in Chapman's "Odysse" ("Two rocks...whose each strength"). It may be rare, but it is not Brodsky's creation.

Second, the line "Well, strike your tent and have your lunch". Raine had some good knock-about fun with this, but doesn't seem to have understood what it means. While a President is being inaugurated, White House staff remove the former President's chattels and install teh new incumbent's. After the ceremonies surrounding being sworn in, the new President goes to the White House, usually to have lunch. This is symbolically important. By "strike your tent" Brodsky clearly means "end this public appearance", and by "have your lunch" he means precisely that.

Third, the line "of brand new taxes whose each cent", which Raine describes as a "clunky approximate tetrameter". True, that's what it is--if you think scansion means applying a mechanical grid. It doesn't. This line scans iamb/iamb/pyrrhic/spondee. The last two feet are often described together (not, I think, helpfully) as a minor Ionic. For earlier examples, we can look at Gower's speech at the start of Act Two of Pericles, where we find "A better pprince and benign lord" and "Is still at Tarsus where each man". Writing in 1910, George Saintsbury described this permissible variation as "not common", but that was, of course, before the early Robert Lowerll, in whose work it is frequent. The effect in Brodsky's case is obvious: to pick out the words "each cent" and to slow the poem as it turns to its final line. I hope this helps.


I believe there is a further reply from Raine, which I have misplaced somewheres...


Mostly I was just tickled pink that this was a heated discussion in a general (if academic) interest journal. No doubt there are prominent American poets and intellectual who might have such a heated discussion, but I don't think it would get published by, say, the New York Times Book Review, or even the New York Review of Books. Sigh.

[Larry Eucher]

"Third, the line "of brand new taxes whose each cent", which Raine describes as a "clunky approximate tetrameter". True, that's what it is--if you think scansion means applying a mechanical grid. It doesn't. This line scans iamb/iamb/pyrrhic/spondee. The last two feet are often described together (not, I think, helpfully) as a minor Ionic."
Interesting, Alicia. I'm curious if you (and others) buy into the above or not. It seems to me that it could just as easily be scanned as pure iambic, although I agree that scanning "each cent" as a spondee adds additional emphasis to the meaning.

[Len Krisak]

Oh well, into the fray.

I believe Brodsky was a dear man,
no doubt a great poet in Russian
(I read NO Russian!), and a certainly competent
versifier (i.e., metrist) in English. Iambs
don't throw him.

But the rhyme thing! Ouch! Without
Hecht and Wilbur to be his best translators,
many, many of his rhymes strike a native
speaker of English as bizarre, to say the least.

As to the issue of a Raine/MacKinnon kind
of exchange in a major American paper,
fugGEDaboutit!

Cheers,

Len

[robert mezey]

I have no idea what Brodsky is like in Russian.
(I suspect, too clever by half.) But in English
verse, ugh. There he ranges from mediocre to
ludicrously bad. And I'd agree that that next-
to-last line is iambic; yes, one could
read it as an ionic, but it's best to do that
only when the phrase is truly ionic. Of the
two Gower examples quoted by Mackinnon, the
first clearly contains an ionic, but the second,
no way, it's straight iambic.

[A. E. Stallings]

I'm so glad other people are reading the penultimate line as iambic. That's how I would tend to read it--"each" being slightly demoted (but still a slow mouthful of a line to say). But then, I don't get published in the TLS...

[A. E. Stallings]

Wait, this just in from the July 20th issue.

Letter from Lachlan Mackinnon:

Sir,

I regret Craig Raine's withdrawl from the debate over Joseph Brodsky's poems in English, the more so because his letter (July 13) left points unresolved. Thrice.

First, Raine's view of logic in Brodsky's "To the President-elect" misses the fact that it makes more sense to "have your lunch" between striking your tent and stirring "an avalanche" than it does to eat first. This is called "ergonomics".

Second, Raine failed to engage properly with Daniel Weissbort's enlightening letter (July 6). In particular, he didn't take on the view that Brodsky may just have opened a new linguistic space in English--one which, as the world language becomes increasingly fissiparous, will probably become increasingly important. As for Brodsky's use of "nitty-gritty", the issue of diction is, sadly, too large and too complext to tackle here.

Third, Raine asserts that I can't scan. He then says that "metrical variation occurs when the assimilation of the part to the whole sounds forced and unnatural. The ear decides." I think he means that variation happens at points where a poem diverges from a regular grid it obeys elsewhere. If so, I agree wholeheartedly. I am the more baffled that Raine reads Brodsky's line "of brand-new taxes whose each cent" as an iambic tetrameter. This indeed seems "forced and unnatural". More importantly, though, in English verse it isn't the ear but the voice that decides: metre is the servant of sense, and not its master. But reading aloud, we discover what metrical effects are present. We then seek to describe them and how they work. Raine's dislike of the technical vocabularly of prosody leaves him rather hard-pressed to discuss it. On this evidence, I would back my ear, George Saintsbury's and, as I adduced, those of the authors of Pericles, against Craig Raine's--any day, any poem.

[A. E. Stallings]

stay tuned...

[SteveWal]

Being terrifically anti-Raine as I am (the words "pompous arse" come to mind whenever I see a picture of him) I am naturally drawn to Lachlann's position...

though I do read that line naturally on its own as iambic, I think it probably reads better as a spondee at the end.

I don't think much of the poem though. It's amusing and I like the Byronic rhymes.

I remember a friend of mine once saying Brodsky had got a poem about Mexico City totally wrong. This friend had been to Mexico City and had a different experience. Course, this friend is so full of stories I'm never sure whether to believe him...