Zitat des Tages von Joseph Brodsky:
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
For a head of state presiding over a ruined economy, an active army with its low wages is god-sent: All he's got to do is provide it with an objective.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
Literature invents its own rules.
Venice is eternity itself.
I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.