#180 The Translator--I

(Scene: Leningrad, the trials of the young poet Joseph Brodsky for ‘parasitism.’ The judge’s name deserves record: one Mme Saveleva. Let her be remembered.)

Henry rushes not in here. The matter’s their matter,

and Hart Crane drowned himself some over money,

but it is Henry’s mutter

that seldom has a judge so coarse borne herself so coarsely

and often has a poet worked so hard for so small

but they was not prosecuted 

in this world. It’s Henry’s matter, after all,

who is ashamed of much of the Soviet world

in their odium of imagination.

Translated not just Pole but Serbian

(a tough one, pal—vreme, vatre, vrtovi)

& Cuban: O a bevy! 

They flocked to him like women, languages.

Bees honey but wound—African worst—Pasternak bees,

whom they dared not to touch

though after they ruin his friend, like this young man

who only wanted to walk beside the canals

talking about poetry and make it.

They all vary in their cultural details according to common underlying themes, authoritarians. Stalin and all the Communists, Mussolini, Hitler and the Fascists, King Henry the 8^th and a whole long list of numbered historical monarchs worldwide, a long, sordid litany of African, Latin American, Asian dictators in smaller countries. There are CEOs in this our own proud nation who rose to their positions through analogous pathologies, and give just as few shits about the people they ruin in the construction and safeguarding and application of their wealth, privilege, and power. They can’t do it alone. They all had/have politicians, bureaucrats, judges, managers, in some cases clergy, in many cases police and military, who take care of the finer details of the work. Censoring opposition is a time-honored tactic, and if you believe George Orwell in 1984, it is one of the very raisons d’être of tyranny, the thing the tyrant and his subordinate tyrants most live for and find satisfying. It’s not just a means to an end, it’s the end in itself, the application of power that justifies having power, power’s mean and dangerous point. I have no doubt whatsoever that some of the meanness we see in contemporary American life and politics follows from the same dictates—education “reform” at all levels, privatized prisons that create a market for human beings, the attacks on women and minorities, the squandering of environmental resources, the removal of the social safety net for the poor—money is the root cause, the movement of wealth upward to the rapacious powerful few whose satisfaction comes not in the having but in the acquiring. The satisfaction of exerting power and suffering through the cultural structures already in place appears to have an enormous satisfaction for certain well-placed, outwardly elegant psychopaths, who in this country wear fine dark wool suits and who communicate through the fabric of their suits and the color and pattern of their ties, like birds of paradise in the esoteric but finely specific details of their mating plumage. Honest words would be clumsy and dangerous. You don’t need them. You speak in code, or you just know. You know where to get the right haircut, and you know the restaurants where you can display the proper bottle of wine. (Drinking the wine is only ancillary to the point.) You communicate through signals that you know what to do. That gains you entrance to the closed circle, where honest, criminal language ventures forth. Most of the time, the waiters don’t record it.

To call a poet a “parasite” in the judgement of a court of law is power taken to such an arrogant extreme, and an extreme of such entrenched, unshakeable confidence, that there’s no longer any need for hiding. The point is not only to silence but to humiliate, and the other point, just as critical, is to crow and spread. Judge Mme Saveleva, it appears from B.’s accusation, did just that, and so a gentle poet bore the brunt of power, was lined up in its bureaucratic crosshairs and took the bullet. For poems.

I’ll quibble with B. on one thing here: He asks that her name be remembered, in infamy and disgrace of course, but remembered and reviled. No. Forget her name. Don’t forget what she did, and don’t forget her victims. But forget her. I’ve forgotten her already. If one of our recent men of power, as just one small representative and un-named example, ever goes to prison, I will write him a long polite letter, outlining how I feel about his war, his corporation, and the people who needlessly died because of his leadership. And I will most definitely include a poem in that letter. I do hope that he lives a long, long time, so that there is ample opportunity for the interior state of his soul and his heart to become apparent across the mismatched halves of his dishonest face. When his heart finally stops, then it will be time to forget that he existed and we can relegate his banality to the comforting emptiness of a particular forgetting.

Communism in the guise that Berryman knew it, in the Soviet Union, has collapsed. It perpetuates for now in other areas, but the USSR is gone. It does have thriving kin and spawn, however. If poetry can teach as well as terrify and comfort, then so much the better. But that’s why some tyrannies imprison poets. Terry Tempest Williams writes about a protest she participated in. She had a pencil and notepad in her pocket. “What are these?” the arresting officer asked. “Weapons,” she replied.