tantalus comes to baroque mansions

Things you can do with yourself in the summer Part 47:


Brodsky talks about Akhmatova

Learn Russian. (Get started now and you'll be up to speed when Natalia comes back in September!) I have often been sorely tempted but I just don't know how I'd fit it in with everything else... there are human limits, after all.

But even if you don't learn Russian - and God knows I have given it the old college try, but I think it might be easier if you have someone to practice it on - do watch this video anyway. First of all, Brodsky sounds beautiful. Russian is a beautiful, musical language, with all its complicated vowels, and it is so densely meaningful that the meaning comes over even if you haven't a clue what's going on. I once cried listening to someone read Eugene Onegin in the original. In a bookshop.

Secondly, this interview contains both video and audio of Akhmatova herself and it is absolutely amazing. There's a picture of her with the (very young, smiling, adorable) Brodsky that is heartbreaking.

I set out, by the way, to write about WS Merwin, whose new Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) I'm reading (and in fact reviewing). But there were only two videos of Merwin, and in the one where he's reading his own work you can barely see or hear him, so that wasn't much use. Nothing ever being in vain, however, I found this other treasure - a rather Merwinian approach if I do say so. So all's not lost, & I'm sure there'll be some Merwin to follow. I'm really enjoying him (oddly, he's sort of like the antithesis of Russian).