When you go out at six in the morning, into the fields, to work as the sun rises, you feel that this gesture is the same as that of millions and millions of other human beings. It is then that you sense human solidarity, I would say. Had I not been arrested and sentenced, I would not have had this experience, I would have been poorer. In a way I was lucky.

This is how Iosif Brodskij wrote about his second arrest in 1963. He was first confined to a psychiatric hospital for about two months, after which, sentenced to five years of detention, he was exiled to a small town near the Arctic Circle. Although he could count on the esteem and admiration of poets such as Anna Achmatova, Brodskij failed to obtain any recognition in Russia. Constantly opposed by the authorities and forced to endure, one attempt after another, the repeated refusals to publish his first manuscript Zimnjaja počta (Winter Mail). In the meantime Brodskij was read ever more widely abroad, and some European and American universities began to invite him, but he could not obtain visas to leave the country. This was so at least until 1972, when OVIR "invited" him to leave. Brodskij seized the occasion. He decided to go to Vienna, and not by chance: there, waiting for him, he found one of the great "shadows"[1] that would mark his career: Wynstan Hugh Auden.
In the same year Brodskij arrived in the United States, and here, at last recognized and free, he was hired as a professor of History of Russian Literature and Theory of Verse at the University of Michigan. Here began what may be considered the author's second life, so much so that even his name, through transliteration, would take another form: Joseph Brodsky.
Despite the success he achieved in America, in his homeland the author continued to be hindered by the government, so much so that his parents would be denied, twelve times over, the possibility of leaving the country to visit their son and, conversely, Brodskij himself would be forbidden to return to Russia for the funeral first of his father and then of his mother. And yet Brodskij's love for his own homeland did not die out. He never disowned the land that gave him birth. Living in the United States, Brodskij learned English, the language in which he also wrote and published three essays: Less than One, On Grief and Reason, Watermark. And yet it is the author himself who speaks in this way of feeling divided between two worlds and two languages:

After twelve years, certain phrases, certain expressions come to me naturally in English. And yet I hear a little voice telling me: no, Joseph, do not betray your culture, your memories, your language. But the more I tell myself no, the more I know I must yield to the temptation, because temptations, if you do not heed them, can turn into neuroses.

A condition of division takes place in Brodskij. This condition, however, is not entirely chosen but imposed by the removal from his own homeland. So much so that it becomes essential, for the one who wanders, to stay anchored, at least in memory, to his own roots. It is for this reason that memory becomes central in Brodskij's poetics.

Serie d'osservazioni. Angolo caldo.
Lo sguardo lascia una scia sulle cose.
L'acqua si ripropone come vetro.
L'uomo è mostruoso più del proprio scheletro.

Sera con vino rosso in nessun posto.
Una veranda assalita dai salici.
Appoggiandosi al gomito riposa il corpo
come morena fuori dal ghiacciaio.

Fra un millennio un fossile bivalve estrarranno
da questa tenda, e rivelerà fra le nappe
l'impronta di due labbra che non hanno
nessuno a cui augurare "Buona notte".[2]

The theme of persistence, the idea of leaving traces, the hope of leaving traces. It is time understood as memory that drives Brodskij to write, more than any other reason. His is a desire for permanence, and it should not surprise us, given the poet's condition, forced into exile, far from everything that was familiar to him. Moreover, if memory can guarantee anything, it is not so much permanence or eternity as unity, the capacity to hold things together, to keep one from being scattered, even as individuals. Constantly, in Brodskij's poems, images of passages appear and disappear, footprints more than feet, shadows more than bodies. Everything is marked by evanescence and emptiness. What can remain is not the subject, but its versum, the furrow it leaves behind.

Così alitando sul vetro, si tracciano
le iniziali di coloro alla cui assenza
non ci si può rassegnare.

It is as if, for Brodskij, the clue, the trace were attestations of presence, the only certainties possible about what exists and what has existed.

La cosa quanto più è invisibile, tanto più è certo
che sulla terra è esistita una volta,
e quindi tanto più essa è dovunque.

Images of shadows, footprints and traces recur, everything that, by reflection, admits or confirms that something has been. A respite from the vain and the void which, however, is filled by the indirect. It is not we who remain, but our wake. This awareness, this thought about the ephemeral makes Brodskij able to let himself be crossed by, and to cross, the course of time. Even paradise, as the poet imagines it, is simply a place where:

Detto questo, non resta che seguire il movimento
delle lancette. E l'occhio senza suono
affonda nello specchio del quadrante:
in paradiso per non disturbare la quiete,
l'orologio non batte.

And it is Brodskij himself who underlines the importance of the concept of time in his poetics:

In any case, in a few words, my main interest is the nature of time. That is what interests me most. What time can do to a man.[3]

It is no accident that Brodskij's poetry so often and so willingly casts objects as protagonists. There is honesty in objects, there is even empathy. So much so that it becomes clear from some of Brodskij's lyrics that objects themselves can become conduits and mirrors of the human condition, which is a condition of solitude. From objects one also draws another lesson about the nature of man: the thing, in fact, reminds the human being of the concept, never forgotten in Brodskij, of finitude.

La solitudine insegna l'essenza delle cose, poiché anche quella
essenza è solitudine.

In Brodskij's compositions there is almost never room for the human. Space is not the kingdom of man, but the kingdom of the void, of things, of silence. It is almost impossible to find the crowd in the Russian poet; wherever his eye comes to rest there is no one. Even at the moment when Brodskij, in his observing, encounters man, the latter always turns into something else.

Nei piccoli paesi la gente non dalla faccia viene
riconosciuta, ma, nelle lunghe file, dalla schiena;
di sabato si mettono all'indiana
uno dietro l'altro, come nel deserto una carovana.

This kind of vision, which often recurs in Brodskij, gives shape to a feeling constantly present in the poet: the perception of his own solitude, certainly as an exile, but also as a human being. In his poetics emerges the idea that the object is stronger. Names, people and places are fragile; they are dimmed by the "little mist that enters the room" of memory. Things are stronger, so much so that:

In loro non c'è bene, né male
di fuori. Se penetri dentro: niente di niente.

For Brodskij, remoteness and distance are nothing other than space that devours time, and with it the word too, and memory too, leaving behind only remains, by nature incapable of filling the lack. Brodskij's poetry is like a confession, cold, cynical. What emerges is that time sweeps things away; there is no attachment, there is no memory sufficient to preserve. This is why his poetry is never pathetic, there is no self-pity. Only in rare cases can one see in his compositions something resembling a desire. In light of this conception of the conflict between space and time, it seems almost logical to trace in Brodskij a certain distrust of memory. It is perhaps also for this reason that his writing, especially once he had reached the United States, becomes fragmentary, discontinuous. The breaking of the verse is the form of the crumbling of memory's content. The past, like the present of the one who loses the past, is not scanned as something horizontal and sequential. This kind of memory shapes the vision of the real, making it resemble a composition of fragments and shards of glass that often wound the poet's eye. This sense of distrust strikes even in those rare lyrics that Brodskij dedicates to Marianna Pavlovna Basmanova (M.B.), the woman he married and by whom he had a son, Andrej. Even in the poems that we might trivially call love poems, Brodskij takes the pulse of impermanence. Distance in time and space generates a slow course, a terminal illness: oblivion.

Come ci chiamavamo, tu ed io, non ha
importanza; basta dire per me cinghia per te camicetta,
per vedere nella specchiera (come fare la carità
a un cieco) che conviene a noi appunto l'anonimia,
come in fondo a ogni cosa viva, cancellata dalla faccia della
terra, quando comandano in silenzio "fuoco!" tutte le cellule.
Le cose hanno dei limiti. La lunghezza, anzitutto,
l'incapacità di spostarsi. E il nostro diritto
al "qui" non si estendeva oltre l'ombra che in una giornata chiara
sopra i mucchi di neve cadeva dalla legnaia
a cuneo. Con lo sguardo in un altro paesaggio, questo cuneo
acuto riterremo che sia il nostro gomito comune
che sporge in fuori e, come nel proverbio russo,
mordere non è dato a te o a me,
né tanto più baciare. In questo senso
noi due ci siamo uniti; anche se
il letto non ha fatto neppure uno scricchiolio.
Esso ora è il mondo intero, con una porta sul lato,
ma anche quella porta – che sa solo le cose per sentito dire –
serve soltanto per andare via.

And yet, it must be said, there is not only resignation in Brodskij, quite the contrary: he faced exile without dramatizing it, just as he did every lived experience. In his life, events that could have broken him followed one after another. Yet none of this happened; Brodskij managed to keep a lucid vision, sad at times, but not desperate. There is no self-pity in his story. The words stand upright, resistant, even in the awareness that everything vanishes. And it is here that, perhaps more than at any other point, one can grasp the greatness of a man, of an intellectual, of a poet. In Brodskij's words we witness the courage to want to persist, without deceiving oneself, since a certi uomini la tigna dell'oblio il senno corrompe, and Brodskij knows it. Hence the wonder that the fragile sight of the Farfalla can arouse in him. The creature that cannot live more than twenty-four hours and to which not even the word to complain of it was given as a gift.

Farfalla

XII

Tanta bellezza
per così breve tempo,
spinge a una congettura
che fa storcer la bocca:
dire con più chiarezza
che il mondo per davvero
creato è senza scopo, o invece,
se scopo esiste mai,
non siamo noi.
Entomologo-amico, per la luce
non ci sono spilli
né per il buio.

XIII

Ti dirò "Addio"?
e addio al giorno che si compie?
a certi uomini la tigna dell'oblio
il senno corrompe;
ma bada, è tutta
colpa del fatto
che hanno dietro le spalle
non giorni a letto in due
non sonni fondi
o sogni folli,
non il passato, ma nubi
di tue sorelle!

XIV

Sei migliore del Nulla.
O meglio: sei più prossima,
sei più visibile.
Di dentro, ad esso
del tutto simile.
Nel volo tuo
il Nulla acquista carne;
nel quotidiano strepito
ecco perché
uno sguardo tu meriti:
sei la barriera lieve
fra il Nulla e me.[4]

It is difficult to add anything, without doing it harm, to a poem of this kind. Just one last reflection: we said earlier how Iosif Brodskij perceives the certainty and the fear of impermanence, but how at the same time he faces all this without dramatizing, without making himself a hero. So much so that, as he himself said, it was necessary for him:

not to raise the voice but, on the contrary, to lower the voice.

Let us leave to his own words, spoken at the award of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, the task of describing who and what a poet is.
Whoever writes a poem writes it above all because the poetic exercise is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thought, of the understanding of the universe. Once one has experienced this acceleration, one is no longer able to give up the adventure of repeating this experience; and one falls into a state of dependence, just as others may become addicted to drugs or alcohol. Whoever finds himself in such a state of dependence upon language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.
On 28 January 1996 he was buried, at his own express wish, in the city he loved so much, Venice. At last rehabilitated and published everywhere, Russia included, Brodskij saw his hope fulfilled:

Poets always return, in flesh or on paper. I want to believe that both are possible.

This article is only a small invitation that poets may never end up being forgotten and may always be able to return.

Notes

[1] This is how Brodskij expressed himself in 1987, at the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, regarding his five great masters: Osip Mandel'stam, Marina Cvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Achmatova, Wystan Hugh Auden.

[2] I. Brodskij, Serie di osservazioni. Angolo caldo, from Poesie, Italian trans. Giovanni Buttafava, Adelphi, Milan, 1986, p. 47. The poems included in the article are mainly drawn from this edition.

[3] S. Birkerts, Intervista con Iosif Brodskij, Edizioni Minimum Fax, Rome, 1996, p. 4.

[4] I. Brodskij, Poesie, p. 29.

Matteo Fiorucci, from Perugia, born in 1989, in December 2012 published Scomparire, a collection of ninety-four poetic texts, written between 2010 and 2012. In January 2013 he began his collaboration with the literary blog Mia madre era un pesce. In the same month he opened his own literary blog: Il diavolo in corpo. In July 2014, three of his compositions in verse were selected for an anthology titled: Poeti Umbri Contemporanei, published by Il Formichiere. He works as an assistant director and playwright with the theater company Occhisulmondo directed by Massimiliano Burini. In the past year, in collaboration with the Australian art therapist Virginia Ryan, he made a documentary on the processes of integration of migrants and asylum seekers through art and artistic expression in general. The documentary will be presented at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He also works in contemporary art photography and stage photography.