A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart ofhis beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave—as he thinks at that moment—a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form—the poem—most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from under that pen on his audience—however great or small it may be—the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language, or more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.
This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential—that is, by all the time lying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is determined by that, too) as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, guarantees the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence—or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain, not merely because language is a more lasting thing than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.
One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule
5S / J o s E P H B R o D s K Y
doesn't know the way it is going to come out; and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries him further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.
There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the biblical prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished to go. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.
1987
(Translated by Barry Rubin)
Acceptance Speech
Members of the Swedish Academy, Your Majesties, ladies and gentlemen, I was born and grew up on the other shore of the Baltic, practically on its opposite gray, rustling page. Sometimes on clear days, especially in autumn, standing on a beach somewhere in Kellomaki, a friend would point his finger northwest across the sheet of water and say: See that blue strip of land? It's Sweden.
He would be joking, of course: because the angle was wrong, because according to the law of optics, a human eye can travel only for something like twenty miles in open space. The space, however, wasn't open.
Nonetheless, it pleases me to think, ladies and gentlemen, that we used to inhale the same air, eat the same fish, get soaked by the same—at times—radioactive rain, swim in the same sea, get bored by the same kind of conifers. Depending on the wind, the clouds I saw in my window were already seen by you, or vice versa. It pleases me to think that we have had something in common before we ended up in this room.
And as far as this room is concerned, I think it was empty just a couple of hours ago, and it will be empty again a couple of hours hence. Our presence in it, mine especially, is quite incidental from its walls' point of view. On the whole, from space's point of view, anyone's presence is incidental in it, unless one possesses a permanent—and usually inanimate—characteristic oflandscape: a moraine, say, a hilltop, a river bend. And it is the appearance of something or somebody unpredictable within a space well used to its contents that creates the sense of occasion.
So being grateful to you for your decision to award me the Nobel Prize for literature, I am essentially grateful for your imparting to my work an aspect of permanence, like that of a glacier's debris, let's say, in the vast landscape ofliterature.
I am fully aware of the danger hidden in this simile: of coldness, uselessness, eventual or fast erosion. Yet if that debris contains a single vein of animated ore—as I, in my vanity, believe it does—then this simile is perhaps prudent.
And as long as I am on the subject of prudence, I should like to add that through recorded history the audience for poetry seldom amounted to more than 1 percent of the entire population. That's why poets of antiquity or of the Renaissance gravitated to courts, the seats of power; that's why nowadays they flock to universities, the seats of knowledge. Your academy seems to be a cross between the two; and if in the future—in that time free of ourselves—that 1 percent ratio is sustained, it will be, not to a small degree, due to your efforts. In case this strikes you as a dim vision of the future, I hope that the thought of the population explosion may lift your spirits somewhat. Even a quarter of that 1 percent would make a lot of readers, even today.
So my gratitude to you, ladies and gentlemen, is not entirely egotistical. I am grateful to you for those whom your decisions make and will make read poetry, today and tomorrow. I am not so sure that man will prevail, as the great man and my fellow American once said, standing, I believe, in this very room; but I am quite positive that a man who reads poetry is harder to prevail upon than one who doesn't.
Of course, it's one hell of a way to get from St. Petersburg to Stockholm; but then, for a man of my occupation, the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points lost its attraction a long time ago. So it pleases me to find out that geography in its own tum is also capable of poetic justice.
Thank you.
1987
After a Journey, or Homage to Vertebrae
No matter how horrid, or else vapid, a day has turned out to be, in the end you stretch out on your bed—and you are no longer an ape, a man, a bird, or even a fish. Horizontality in nature is rather of a geological denomination and has to do with deposits: it is an homage to vertebrae and designed for the future. The same, on the whole, goes for all sorts of travel notes and memoirs: the mind there seems to get flat on its back and give up resistance, preparing for a rest rather than for settling scores with reality.