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    Joseph Brodsky Letter To Horace PDF

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    mrsflakes

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Letter to Horace oo ‘My dear Horace, If what Suetonius tells us about your ining your bed- room walls with mirrors to enjoy coitus from every angle is true, you may find this letter a bit dull, On the other hand, you may be entertained by its coming to you from a part of | the world whose existence you never suspected, and some two thousand years after your death, at that: Not bad for a reflection, is it? You were in 8.8.c., though you weren't aware of ‘anew millennium coming. As for myself, Lam fifty-four now; ‘my own millennium, too, has only afew vears to run, What- ‘ever new order of things the future has in store, anticipate none of it either. So we may talk, I suppose, man to man, Horace. And I may as well begin with a locker-room kind of story. Last night 1 as in bed rereading your Odes, and I bumped into that one to your fellow poet Rufus Valgius in which you are trying to convince him not to grieve so much over the loss of his son (according to some) or his lover (according to others). You proceed for a couple of stanzas 429 / Letter to Horace ‘with your exempla, telling him that So-and-so lost this per- son and Such-and-such another, and then you suggest to Rufus that he, as a kind of self-therapy, get engaged in praising Augustus’ new triumphs. You mention several re- cent conquests, among them grabbing some space from the Seythians Actually, that must have been the Gelon; butt doesn't matter. Funny, I hada't noticed this ode belore. My people—well, in a manner of speaking—aren't mentioned that often by great poets of Roman antiquity. The Greeks ae a diferent matter, since they rubbed shoulders with us ‘quite a bit. But even with them we don' fare that well A few bits in Homer (of which Strabo makes such a meal af- terward), a dozen lines in Aeschylus, not much more in Euripides. Passing references, basically; but nomads don't deserve any better. OF the Romans, I used to think, i was only poor Ovid who paid us any heed; but then he had no choice. There is practically nothing about us in Virgil, not ‘to mention Catllus or Propertivs, not to mention Lucretius, ‘And now, lo and behold, erumb from your table. Perhaps, I said to mysel, 1 sratch him hard enough, {nay find a reference tothe par of the world I find myself in now. Who knows, he might have had a fantasy, a In this line of work that happens. Bat you never were a visionary. Quiky, unpredictable, yes—but nota visionary, To advise a griefstricken fellow to change his tune and sing Caesar's victories—this you could do; but to imagine another land and another heaven—well, for that one should turn, I guess, to Ovid. Or wait for another millennium, On the whol, you Latin poets were bigger on reflection and rumination than on conjecture. 1 suppose be- ‘ause the empire was lage enough as it was to strain one's ‘on imagination, 490 / JOSEPH BRODSKY So there I was, lying across my unkempt bed, in this un- imaginable (for you) place, on a cold February night, some two thousand years later. The only thing I had in common with you, T thought, was the latitude and, of course, the litle volume of your Collected, in Russian translations. At the time you wrote allthis, you see, we didn’t have a lan- rage, We weren't even we; we were Geloni, Getae, Buin etc. just bubbles in our own future gene pool. So two thou- sand years were not for nothing, after all, Now we ean read you in our own highly inflected language, with its famous gutta-percha syntax suiting the translation of the likes of you marvelously Stil, 1am writing this to you ina language with whose l- phabet you are more familiar. Alot more, I should add, than I am. Cyrillic, [am afraid, would only bewilder you even fur- ther, though you no doubt would recognize the Greek char- acters. OF course the distance between us is too large to ‘worry about increasing it—or, for that matter, about trying to shrink it. But the sight of Latin letters may be of some com- fort to you, no matter how bewildering their use may look So I was lying atop my bed with the little volume of your Carmina, The heat was on, but the cold night outside was winning. It is a small, two-storied wooden affair I ive in here, and my bedroom is upstaits, As I looked atthe ceiling, Tould almost see cold seeping through my gambrel roof & sort of antichaze. No mirrors here. At a certain age one doesn't care for one’s own reflection, company or no com- pany; especially if no. That's why I wonder whether Su tonius tells the truth. Although T imagine you would be pretty sanguine about that as well. Your famous equipoise! Besides, for all this latitudinal identity, in Rome it never ets that cold. A couple of thousand years ago the climate 431 / Letter to Horace perhaps was different; your lines, though, bear no witness to that. Anyhow, I was getting sleepy. ‘And I remembered a beauty I once knew in your town. She lived in Subura, in a small apartment bristling with flowerpots but redolent with the smell ofthe crumbling ps perbacks the place was stulfed with. They were everywhere, bbut mostly on shelves reaching the ceiling (the ceiling, admit- tedly, was low). Most of them were not hers but belonged to her neighbor across the hall, about whom I heard a lot but whom I never met. The neighbor was an old woman, a widow, who was born and spent her entice life in Libya, in Leptis Magna. She was Italian but of Jewish extraction—or :maybe it was her husband who was Jewish, At any rate, when he died and when things began to heat up in Libya, the old lady sold her house, packed up her stuf, and came to Rome, Her apartment was apparently even smaller than my tender ‘companion’s, and jammed with a lifetime's accretions. So the two women, the old and the young, struck a deal whereupon the latter's bedroom began to resemble a regular second- hhand-book store. What jarred with this impression wasn't so much the bed as the large, heavily framed mirror lean- ing somewhat precariously against a rickety bookshelf right across from the bed, and at such an angle that whenever I or ‘my tender companion wanted to imitate you, we had to strain and crane our necks rather desperately. Otherwise the mir- ror would frame only mote paperbacks. In the early hours it could give one an eerie feeling of being transparent. ' Al that happened ages ago, though something nudges ime to mutter, centuries ago. In an emotional sense, that would be valid. In fact, the distance between that place in Subura and my present precincts psychologically is larger than the one between you and me. Which is to say that in neither case are “millennia” inapplicable. Or to say that, to ‘me, your realty is practically greater than that of my private 492 / Josern Bropsxy memory. Besides, the name of Leptis Magna interferes with both. I've always wanted to vist there; in fact, it became a sott of obsession with me once I began to frequent your town and Mediterranean shores in general. Well, partly because 1 of the floor mosaics in some bath there contains the only surviving likeness of Virgil, and a likeness done in his life- time, at that! Orso I was told; but maybe i's in Tunisia, In Africa, anyway. When one is cold, one remembers Affica, And when it's hot, also, Ah, what wouldn't give to know what the four of you looked like! To put a face to the lyric, not to mention the epic. 1 ‘would settle for a mosaic, though Id prefer a fresco. Worse comes to worse, L would resign myself to the marbles, except that the marbles are too generio—everybody gets blond in ‘marble—and too questionable. Somehow, you are the least cof my concerns, e., you are the easiest to picture. If what Suetonius tells us about your appearance is indeed true— at least something in his account must be true!—and you ‘were short and portly, then you most likely looked like Eu- le or Charlie Chaplin in the King in New York period. The one I cant picture forthe life of me is Ovid Even Propertis is easier: skinny, sickly, obsessed with his ‘equally skinny and sickly redhead, he is imaginable. Say, a «ross between William Powell and Zbigniew Cybulski, But not Ovid, though he lasted longer than all of you. Als, not in those parts where they carved likenesses. Or lad mosaics Or bothered with frescoes. And if anything of the sort was done before your beloved Augustus kicked him out of Rome, then it was no doubt destroyed, So as not to offend high sensibilities. And afterward—well, afterward any shb of ‘marble would do, As we used to say in northern Seythia— Hyperborea to you—paper can endure anything, and in your day marble was kind of paper. genio Mon 433 / Letter to Horace You think Lam rambling, but Iam just trying to reproduce the train of thought that took me late last ight to an un. usually graphic destination. It meandered abit, for sure; but ‘not that much, For, one way or another, I've always been thinking about you four, especially about Ovid. About Pub lius Ovidius Naso. And not for reasons of some particular af= finity. No matter how similar my circumstances may now and then appear to his in the eyes of some beholder, I won't Produce any Metamorphoses. Besides, twenty-two years in ‘these parts won't rival ten in Sarmatia. Not to mention that I saw my Terza Roma crumble. Ihave my vanity, but it has its limits. Now that they are drawn by age, they are more palpa. Dle than before. But even as a young pup, kicked out of my hhome to the Polar Circle, I never fancied myself playing his double. Though then my empire looked indeed eternal, and ‘one could roam on the ice ofour many delta all winter long. No, I never could conjure Naso’ fice. Sometimes I see him played by James Mason—a hazel eye soggy with grief and mischief; at other times, though, it's Paull Newman's winter-gray stare, But, then, Naso was a very protean fellow, with Janus no doubt presiding over his lares. Did you two get long, or was the age diflerence too big to bother? ‘Twenty-two years, after all. You must have known him, at least through Maecenas. Or did you just think him too ffiv- lous, saw it coming? Was there bad blood between you? He must have thought you ridiculously loyal, true blue ina sort ‘of quaint, selE:made man’s kind of way. And to you he, was just a punk, an aristo, privileged from the eradle, ete. Not like you and Anthony Perkins's Virgil, practically working. class boys, only five years’ diference. Or is this too much Karl Marx reading and moviegoing, Horace? Perhaps. But wait, there is more. There is Dr. Freud coming into this, too, for what sort of interpretation of dreams is it, if t's not filtered through good old Ziggy? For it was my good old subconscious the tran of thought I just mentioned was taking ‘me to, late lastnight, and at some speed. Anyhow, Naso was greater than both of you—well, a least as far as 'm concerned. Metrically, ofcourse, more monot- 30 is Virgil. And so is Propertius, forall his emo- tional intensity. In any case, my Latin stinks; that’s why I read you all in Russian. It copes with your asclepiadie verse ina far more convincing way than the language Iam writing this in, for all the familiarity of the latter’ alphabet. The latter just can't handle dactyls. Which were your forte, More exactly, Latin’s forte. And your Carmina i their showease, So 1am reduced to judging the stuff by the quality of imagination. (Here's your defense, if you need one.) And fn that score Naso beats you all. All the same, I can't conjure up your fives, his espe

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