JOSEPH BRODSKY
535
DM:
Or as Robert Frost said, free verse is like playing tennis
without a net.
JB :
Well, it's not tennis. And not cricket either.
DM:
Are you getting together a new book of poems
In
English
translation?
JB:
That's somewhere on the horizon .
DM:
Will it be by various translators, as was
A Part of Speech?
JB:
I would imagine so, because otherwise the book would be very
slim.
DM:
You're a translator yourself. You've done particularly difficult
poets , John Donne , for example. Do you feel your work's been well
translated into English?
JB :
Sometimes it has, sometimes it hasn't. On the whole , I think I
have less to complain about than any of my fellow Russians, dead or
alive. Or poets in other languages. My luck, my fortune is that I've
been able to sort of watch over the translations. And at times I would
do them myself.
DM:
Since Russian is an inflected language and phonetically very
different from English, it must bother you that the sounds, the syn–
tax , and the quality of the original can't be conveyed.
JB :
Yes, but that's what makes translation intricate and interesting.
Curlicue. Other people solve crossword puzzles; well, I have transla–
tions. Essentially the operation is like solving a crossword puzzle, ex–
cept that the next day they don't print the answers . On the whole,
though, the principles of assonance or consonance in English are not
that drastically different from the Russian. A word is a word. A
sound is a sound, after all.
DM:
Are you translating anyone into Russian now?
JB:
Not for the moment, no .
DM:
If you object to the next questions, please tell me .
JB :
Go ahead.
DM:
I want to ask you about the trial.
JB :
That was many moons ago. Nothing interesting about it.
DM:
We can read the shorthand account of it, but what was it like
from your point of view? It was a mock trial. It must have seemed
absurd, though it was no joke .
It
must have made you angry.
JB :
It
didn't make me angry . In fact, it did not. Never. No, ajoke it
wasn't.
It
was dead serious. I can talk about that at length, but in
short ... how shall I put it? It simply was an enactment of what I
knew all along. But it's nice when things are
enacted,
you know . I
