All over the map. (Verse chronicle).(religious poetry criticism)(Critical Essay)

Joseph Brodsky tried to write a poem every Christmas, concentrating the vanishing energies of the year on a day when even unbelievers may be forgiven a twinge of belief--that is what myths are for. Nativity Poems collects the nineteen poems he finished, of which more than half have never been translated into English. (1) Brodsky has been a difficult poet to bring over from Russian--the rhyming forms he favored have fewer and fewer masters in English, and the longer he lived in America the more cocksure he became in his adopted language. In his last books, he was translating without help and writing too many poems directly into English, in which he had a wooden ear as well as a wooden tongue. Poetry, unlike prose, is almost impossible to write in a language not mastered until adulthood.

Nativity Poems is the best book of Brodsky translations since A Part of Speech (1980), from which a few poems have been reprinted. It would be tempting to say that what is good in these translations isn't Brodsky and what is Brodsky isn't good (it would be tempting, but it wouldn't quite be true). Most poets would benefit from having Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht render their poems in English--even if the poems were in English already. Heaney wears his Irish warmth like a badge of authority; Walcott is a master of scumbled image; and Wilbur and Hecht could make a list of telephone numbers look as classical as a Corinthian column. You might think such translations would be simply a version of Heaney, or Walcott, or Wilbur, or Hecht, but it's by just such supplements of personality that translation regains some of the losses incurred in the dark passage from one language to another. This is Brodsky through Heaney:

 
   (but in the cerulean thickening over the 
   Infant 
 
   no bell and no echo of bell: He hasn't yet 
   earned it.) 
   Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from 
   darkness, and stranded 
   immensely in distance, recognizing Himself 
   in the Son 
   of Man: homeless, going out to Himself in 
   a homeless one. 

The ending is as hard to swallow as a whole potato (you can see from the en face Russian text--a luxury--that in the last line Brodsky's syntax is more impacted and the wordplay more charged), but the rest has the quiet tremble of Heaney's domestic scenes.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation, as Frost said, but a shadowy portrait of Brodsky emerges when you subtract his translators' quirks of style. Behind Heaney or Walcott lies Brodsky's way of pacing the landscape against the line, or moving from the sandy particular to the starry universal. A reader is more likely to find the range of the original when the translations are by different hands. (When Brodsky translated himself it sounded as if he'd been translated by committee--a committee of refrigerators).

The weaknesses of Brodsky's poems in English aren't always the translators' fault. You might blame Glyn Maxwell for the matey tone of "`There is no God. The earth's a mess' `Too right. I'll take up chicks, I guess,'" but you must condemn Brodsky, in the same translation, for the clumsy imagery (if not the grammar) of "Everyone .../is really in essence a girl, a virgin/keen to unite--like your slacks imagine/ a skirt out there to go running to." You might quarrel with Paul Muldoon over the hopped-up idiom of "those hotshot/ wise men ... schlepping along with their groaning coffers,/for all the little children in their carry cots," but only Brodsky, who translated himself (like a barber cutting his own hair), is responsible for this doggerel, with its ludicrous allusion to Frost:

 
   And staring up where no cloud drifts 
   because your sock's devoid of gifts 
   you'll understand this thrift: it fits 
   your age; it's not a slight. 
   It is too late for some breakthrough, 
   for miracles, for Santa's crew. 
   And suddenly you'll realize that you 
   yourself are a gift outright.