To a tyrant - a poem by Joseph Brodsky

I am in my native village of Hyen for the month of July, and when I am home I have a selection of poets whose verse I especially enjoy as I think them particularly suitable to be enjoyed in this setting. One of these poets is Joseph Brodsky, whom I only read in Norwegian or English translations. Among those of his poems which have stayed with me the most strongly, is the poem "To a tyrant" from his collection A Part of Speech, and it is this poem I wish to present to you here. Although I first read this poem in a beautiful Norwegian rendition - and therefore always read it in this rendition - I here give you the translation into English as published in Collected poems in English, published by Carcanet in 2001. It is not specified which of the various translators of the volume who wrought the translation of "To a tyrant", or whether it was Brodsky himself who did all of it.

To a tyrant

He used to come here til he donned gold braid,
a good topcoat on, self-controlled, stoop-shouldered.
Arresting these café habitués -
he started snuffing out world culture somewhat later -
seemed sweet revenge (on Time, that is, not them)
for all the lack of cash, the sneers and insults,
the lousy coffee, boredom, and the battles
at vingt-et-un he lost time and again.

And time has had to stomach that revenge.
The place is now quite crowded; bursts of laughter,
records boom out. But just before you sit
you seem to feel an urge to turn your head around.
Plastic and chrome are everywhere - not right;
the pastries have an aftertaste of bromide.
Sometimes before the place shuts down he'll enter
straight from a theater, anonymous, no fuss.

When he comes in, the lot of them stand up.
Some out of duty, the rest in unfeigned joy.
Limp-wristed, with a languid sweep of palm,
he gives the evening back its cozy feel.
He drinks his coffee - better, nowadays -
and bites a roll, while perching on his chair,
so tasty that the very dead would cry
"Oh, yes!" if only they could rise and be there.

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.

York Elegies

 

This summer I read Joseph Brodskys Roman elegies, a set of poems invoking the minutiae of everyday life and the great shadow of history at the same time. Having been to Rome some time ago I felt the poems resonating with me and it made me think of other places I had visited, places where I had spent as much time as it appeared Joseph Brodsky had spent in Rome. My thoughts naturally fled to York, a city regular readers of this blog will know I have a special place for in my heart. The next course of action was inevitable: I decided to write my own elegies in emulation of Brodsky's, only these were to be set in the heart of Yorkshire rather than the eternal city.

York Elegies

After Joseph Brodsky

I) January

The rain in England is different. By the banks of the Ouse

there are imprints of boots in dried and sun-cracked silt:

some vagrant walked here. It was - perhaps - me,

carefully making sense of a different home

like a mendicant scouting the city's outskirts

before lining up his hospital.

The river is borne away into the twilight

while I have just arrived,

still are we both just passing through

and even in this month of beginnings the end

can be sensed far closer than I should like.

So like the silt-framed footprint will I fade

until devouring time has wiped away

all traces of my visit I had left behind me.

II) February

Vagrants find their homes in the strangest nooks.

So I, the prodigal scholar, have found

my sheltered perch among the pigeons.

Here I share the skyline with these English chimneys

that breathe their carboniferous fogs mingling

with the mists of each and all seasons. Smoke

speaks of Albion's slumber, of giants long receded

from the world's theatrics, content with the quiet moor,

the country life. I, too, am content with little:

the writing desk, the sink, the creaking wardrobe,

the bed and bookshelves begging to be stacked;

this is the detail I find most pleasing.

Here will I make my garrison, and from this outpost

must I conduct my campaigns through the books

only the fool thinks he can conquer. You, O House,

have an emperor's name and your dilapidations

become a bitter metaphor for the fall of too proud men.

III) March

The world seems at an end beyond this precinct.

Engulfed in the sunset's imperial holocaust

the earth's rim fades to ashes and go black,

and I, shielded by the guardian archer's

crenellated vantage point, can almost see

my own conclusion mirrored in the waning light.

Have you ever walked the walls of York at sundown,

seen its ghosts parade in the evening, or with your naked eye

trailed the minute stitches of their tapestry?

The sun requires no more than this:

to have its death lamented by the mirroring Ouse.

Why, then, should I demand a boisterous farewell?

Let me rather like the sun recede into enveloping darkness,

let me wind my way through the world and back

so that when I return I will be greeted

not as a prodigal but as a native, and let me once again

feel the weight of History upon my bones.

IV) April

This city has seen much blood. Here kings and queens

with royal cunning placed their sigils in the stone

to the dirge of wailing women and the crackling flame.

O heart of the harried north: what tears you may have left

spare them for the years to come: History

has not yet run its course. Once this was warrior country,

then longboats were replaced by the merchant's cogs

that brought about an empire in their golden wake.

I have no stomach for the trader's tricks, the drawn sword

or the government's orderly cartography

dividing the terrain like a knife does a hog's shank.

I much prefer the brick-walled lanes,

the domestic nooks that are Albion's heartland:

weather-beaten, plain and half-forlorn

save by the pigeon's armies. Rather than famous

battlefields I find a pleasure roaming these homely streets

and observe from a safe and objective distance

the ubiquitous ivy's recalcitrant advance.

V) May

This is a city of books. The various and time-worn

stones and bricks are pages of the city's history,

and this makes churches, walls and houses tomes

composed in a language different yet somehow quite familiar.

Select, then, a volume from this library, peruse its chapters,

illuminations, marginalia; read in the churches and gates

a history we try to be a part of. Famed men have

by their quills and pens put York to paper:

Bede, Alcuin, Auden, Joseph Brodsky.

Yet York has not been written by scribes or scholars,

but by the master mason, the architect, the carpenter,

the glazier who bound these books by their own

enduring crafts, lined on the earth's bleached parchment

the margins with their instruments, prepared the churches' quires

and stacked the streets with chronicles, shelving

the houses according to an old, time-honoured system

like librarians part serious, part playful.

 
VI) June

Can one mourn what one has not possessed?
Yes: like the eye mourns the horizons it has not seen

or the mind the books unread, so do I mourn

that I have not yet known the City of York

as it appears in June, attired for the first of summer's masques.

June, the epoch of the daffodils guarding Clifford's Tower

like sentries superannuated by the whims of time,

the epoch of strangers and vagrants,

roaming about the streets like ghosts or gods

exiled from a long-lost fabled country

so distant and so different from ours,

the epoch of sun and tired sundays broken only

by the chime of minster bells, summoning

the faithful and the faithless by the same forsaking ting.

 
VI) July

Speak not to me of love, for it has lost its touch

by taking too many forms; for precision

speak rather of longing and that aching absence

July demands from the homebound exile. Sighs

are the prodigal's tithe and all must pay.
I did not at first believe mere stone could command

such obedience, yet here I am - a wandering man -

remembering the churches, the walls, the scattered spolia

that frames the gardens and keeps the flowers at bay

in almost-monastic discipline. These were all framed by love

and in the end torn down by a different love,

a worldy love of kingship and inheritance that

plows the potter's ground. By that act it seemed

the age-old war was over, the mundane sword

cleaving the sacred stone claimed monarchy supreme,

blasphemed the mason's craft and outlawed monastic houses

for the sake of a coppiced kingdom frail in its burgeoning.

 
VIII) August

Like a road redundant yields to the willow herb,

the dandelions and the tall grass so I,

a native stranger, consider a year too long

and yield to the gnawing urges,

packing my bags and go down the westward road.

Albion rises in the mind's horizon

pressing heavenward with its spired, craggy bulk,

green-coated, wind-harrowed, arching

as in pain under the weight of its past.

And there, there is Albion's jewel:

heart of the Northern reaches,

chiming its sundry bells to a song I know.

There they received their freedom, there

they performed their plays in honour of God

and Christ, and the Holy Spirit:

Barkers, carpenters, mercers, men of all trades,

Coaxing me thither with a song of the heart-stringed lute.

So I come, heeding its beckoning whisper

Like a vagrant gyrfalcon the pipe of its falconer.

 
IX) September

Darkness is easily endured with good friends.

We make our way through evening and the air

is still, clear and the light of lamps

hints at the city's outline in the quietness.

Once light was scarce and the world wild,

the wanderer was prey to the mighty beasts

who ruled the wood of Galtres and craved tallage

in flesh of men and women. Lest a guiding flare

ablaze in the lantern of St. Helen's Church

would lead them to salvation, the children of men

might fall as sheep for wolves whose haughty sermons

pander to nothing at all but their maw's faith.

The wood is long since gone, the light remains

and even in the labyrinth of lamp-posts

the lantern shines so meekly and yet and so bright

it still may lead the wayward through the world's maze.

 
X) October

Rot is October's fragrance: decaying, brittle leaves

gather in clusters by the iron fences,

in glutted ditches, ponds of no man's dominion

and sweetly ooze through the suburbs

on the road to Micklegate Bar as once did

the spiked heads of traitors on the gate's front.

I am a traitor too: my affair with the English tongue,

old and long-standing, has proved far more than a fling.

Rot is a poignant metaphor for a human thing:

Loyalty; houses; flesh; identity.

There is a gentler scent suffused in the pubs and

the rented rooms, of oak and fungi,

beer and decomposing wood, like frail lives

growing musty in the hands of History

to fall as oblivious vestiges into marginal notes.

This is the place I love: My Albion is crumbling at the edges

and curls as a dying leaf in October days.

Such was the first encounter;

it will not do to go separate ways.

XI) November

From this point men can rule a world:

lords of the spiritual North with pious pomp

wielded their sceptred croziers

in the face of kings to have the world's sword

tarnished. Atop St. Peter's minster a priest,

guarded by grinning gargoyles

and xiphoid spires piercing the firmament,

may feel removed from the secular stain. Below

archbishops steeped themselves in the ways of flesh,

to fight or to be fought with in their chosen manner,

dying as rich men or as God's minstrels.

This is a nest of stone, a phoenix's nest

that burns and rises at quaint intervals,

making the mason mourn his lost handiwork

and weep like an angel. Sing, then, a dirge for

what Earth has lost, for King Edwin's minster,

the glazier's vitrified blood, the weather-worn woodwose

and men who abandoned their faith for the sword's work.

 
XII) December

I write this in August imagining a white world.

I hope one day to discover how the snow descends

upon these fractured ruins: history's great slumber

haunted by dreams of blood and martyrdom,

rigid justice, blank eyes staring hostless

from an iron spike. In that time

the frost will forge its finest filigree

formed like fossilised ferns on the city's flagstones,

memorials of time immemorial honouring

the earth-evicted ammonite, the raptor,

the trilobite class-caged and far removed from

primordial seas. Once this was wild country,

left to the reign of beasts, to fangs and claws.

Time has worn away that wild country,

what remains holds little semblance

while wild and tamed alike lie heavily

sleeping, white-capped and covered

waiting for sun and spring.

- June - August 2012



Notes

January

"while I have just arrived" - I arrived in York January 07 2011 ready to begin my studies at the University of York. The pictures from January are among the first I took.

February

(...) my sheltered perch - I lived on the upper floor in Constantine House and I was frequently bothered by nesting pigeons.

(...) of giants long receded - a nod to William Blake's The Emanation of the Giant Albion and a reference to York's significantly diminished importance in England's political life compared to its Medieval days.

(...) an emperor's name - the house being named after Emperor Constantine who was reportedly born in York.

March

my own conclusion - I left York 30 March 2011.

April

(...) their sigils in the stone - In the Middle Ages York was the nexus of the English king's northern politics and sometimes a thorn in the side. William the Conqueror and Henry VIII both wrought havoc on the city due to its reticence in accepting the former's accession to the throne and the latter's reformation. Other royals as well have made their mark upon York. John granted the city its liberties in 1212, Henry III refurbished the royal residence now known as Clifford's tower, Richard III established the council of the north and had his son invested as Prince of Wales here in 1483.

(...) the harried north - The Harrowing of the North was William the Conqueror's response to northern dismissal of his claim to the English throne.

then longboats were replaced - York grew to be an important mercantile centre in the Middle Ages and had ties to several European ports.

May

by their quills and pen - Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is an important source to York's early Medieval history. York native Alcuin wrote a poem about York as did Joseph Brodsky. Auden's inclusion is primarily due to him, too, being a native of the city, hence fastening the city to paper by biographical circumstance.

July

for the sake of a coppiced kingdom - Henry VIII's divorce from the Roman Church came about primarily due to his need of a son to sustain the newly-established Tudor dynasty. St. Mary's Abbey was torn down in the 1540s.

August

there they received their freedom - John's charter of 1212 granted the city its liberties, a charter he issued to raise money for his military troubles in northern France. The octocentennial for this historical milestone is being celebrated this year.

they performed their plays - the York Mystery Plays started up in the 14th century and is one of the most important and formative cycles of mystery plays in Medieval England. The plays were discontinued in the 16th century as a part of the reformation, but started up again in the 1950s.

Barkers, carpenters, mercers - each play was performed and arranged by one of the guilds of the city. The barkers prepared hides for leather manufacture and were responsible for the The Fall of the Angels. The carpenters were responsible for The Resurrection, while the merces arranged The Last Judgement.

September

Darkness is easily endured - this entire stanza revolves around an evening out with friends in September 2011 when I was visiting my friends and former flatmates in York.

(...) Lest a guiding flare - St. Helen's Church is one of at least three churches in York whose spires are shaped like lanterns designed to guide people through darkness in a world before streetlamps. The wood of Galtres is no longer extant but it was once infested with wolves and a considerable obstacle for travellers.

(...) wolves whose haughty sermons - a reference to Archbishop Wulfstan of York's (d.1023) Sermo lupi ad anglos, a sermon admonishing Englishmen for their sins and claiming the Vikings as their just punishment from God.

October

Rot is October's fragrance - this stanza revolves around my first trip to York back in October 2009 and I remember very distinctly the smell of England.

the spiked heads of traitors - Micklegate Bar was the main gate of York in the Middle Ages and also where beheaded traitors were put on display as a warning to the people.

November

archbishops steeped themselves - Archbishops were among the most important political figures in the Middle Ages and the heart of the religious life in the North and consequently were very much engaged in secular matters, either in opposition or as partakers in the mundane affairs.

(...) a phoenix's nest - York Minster has been subject to fire and refurbishings throughout the centuries. The last fire was in 1984 and, as all Medieval cathedrals, it is perennially undergoing renovation. I owe this particular image to the tv series Pillars of the Earth based on Ken Follett's novel.

King Edwin's minster - St. Peter's minster was erected for the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria in 627. This was a major step in the christianisation of England.

December

(...) class-caged and far removed - a nod to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species where Darwin rhetorically asks whether the beautiful ammonites were created so that men could put them behind glass.

haunted by dreams of blood and martyrdom - In the time following England's turn away from Catholicism York saw several martyrs of the old faith, most famously Margaret Clitherow.

formed like fossilised ferns - I have seen the frost make very fern-like patterns on the flagstone in York Exhibition Square in January.