. Now he has published books of twenty Nobel Prize Laureates, if we add Derek. So in the publishing house I took Walcott's works and then I understood that that poem was not, as they say, a coincidental creative success, it was not an exception. I especially liked the long, book length, autobiographical work in verse "Another Life."
	You know, in literature there exist, especially in a certain stage, such fundamental (in a certain period) works. We have Blok's "Revenge", or later Pasternak's "Lieutenant Shmidt", or some other works. These found in poetry what could be seen as a new climate. "Another Life" is such a new territory. Not to mention the fact that the territory described in this poem is literally new, both in the psychological and in the geographical sense. And the methods of description are somewhat specific. later, in 1978 or 1979, both of us, Walcott and I, found ourselves to be members of the jury of the journal "International Literature Today", which is published in Oklahoma and awards a prize once in two years. Eugenio Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and others were awarded this prize. The jury consisted of thirty people, each of whom proposes his or her candidate. I proposed Milosh, and Walcott proposed Naipol, who is almost his countryman. By the way, I heard rumours that in Stockholm their positions were also head-to-head, and Walcott won. They are rather good friends.
	-- [A Nobel Prize will not be given so soon again to the Caribbean region, and Naipol, although he is two years younger than Walcott, still is already sixty.]
	-- But this is not important. In Oklahoma the final stage is based on the Olympic principle, and the contest was between Milosh and Naipol. Milosh won, and I understood that Walcott gave up his candidate for mine. I asked him why he did so, and he answered -- and this shows what kind of a poet Walcott is, -- he said, "you see, I gave up my candidate absolutely not for the reason you may imagine. The matter is not Eastern Europe, Nazism, The Holocaust and so on. What happened and happens today in our archipelago is by no means less than the catastrophes of the Poles or the Jews, especially in the moral sense. The criterion, said Walcott, is totally different: I like it when behind what I read -- in poetry or in prose -- I hear a certain rumble. The rumble of the Spheres, one may say. And in Naipol I don't feel it, while in Milosh I do." From then on -- not from that sentence, but from the Oklahoma period in general -- we became great friends.
	-- [Do you use exactly this word? The word "friend" in Russian is stronger than this word in English.]
	-- You know, he is a person of incredible warmth. That is, radiance glows from him. Moreover, this is not any kind of extrasensorial thing, these are simply, in fact, waves of warmth, right? When I am with him, I am always inside this field. In fact it is as if he was too much warmed by the sun -- considering where he comes from.
	-- [I was once in the company of Walcott and other people and I remember well that there was always laughter around him.]
	-- This is true. He is a person with a fantastic sense of humour. Moreover, he is very much alive, there is always something new on his mind. And altogether I never remember that he would have to rest, be ill -- heavens forbid! -- be bored, rot. For the last twenty years he is the closest person to me among English speakers. We were together in the most varied situations in this hemisphere, and also in the other one.
	-- [In all the articles accompanying the conferment of the Nobel Prize your words are quoted: "the best poet of the English language"...]
	-- I do indeed think so. And they are bound to quote me because I wrote about him, and a lot. Not that I am proud of it... Although yes, I am proud that it is I. I am proud and even may boast of it.
	-- [In the book "Less than One" in the article about Walcott, "The Sound of the Tide", you write that Walcott is outside literary schools. So in what is expressed his, as you put it, "fundamental" significance? What are the "new territories" you mention?]
	-- In this small article I paraphrase Mandelshtam: "This is already the fourth century that I (...) dash against Russian poetry." Walcott was dashing against English poetry in a similar way and now has finally dashed against it totally. How is he remarkable? It is in the classical manner which does not constitute an alternative to modernism but rather absorbs modernism. Walcott writes in meter, is exceedingly varied in rhymes. I think that there is no person who rhymes in English better than Walcott. Moreover, he is very colourful. And in fact colour is spiritual information. When we talk about animals, mimicry is more important than adaptability, right? This means something. There is a rather long history behind all that -- at least evolution, and this is not a small thing, it is in fact longer than history. Walcott is an "Adam" poet, that is he came from a world in which not everything has yet been given a meaning and a name. That world was inhabited not so long ago. Not yet totally colonised by Westerners. By whites. There the majority uses concepts which, to a certain degree, are still not completely based on experience and consciousness.
	-- [We have witnessed something similar with the Latin American novel, which is closer to the myth than refined Europe or North America.]
	-- Derek by race is black. It is true that he has a mix of many elements. Yet when you are born as a subject of the British empire and you are coloured, you find yourself in a quite remarkable situation. If your vocation is culture, then your choice is very limited. Either to be submerged in nostalgia for some non-existing roots, because there is no tradition whatsoever except oral tradition, or to go out in search of asylum in the culture of your masters. The first is comfortable, because there is nothing there, no terminology, only sentimentality.
	-- [And also you are the first there. When I was young I regretted not being born to one of the tiny northern nations: by the age of thirty, one may have a collection of works published and everything flows as a matter of course.]
	-- In any case you find yourself only momentary support. The audience and so on. And you do not have to think, it is more important that you feel.
	-- [In the other case you describe, the comptetition is totally different, of course.]
	-- Everything is more complicated. You find yourself inside the history of a culture which has to be absorbed, with which to struggle and so on. A huge world in which much has been formulated. That alone can crush you. Not to mention that you get constant reproaches from your countrymen, that you sold yourself out, as we say, to the Bolsheviks.
	-- [That is, in that case, to the Big White People.]
	-- Big White People, yes. A big culture. But such is the power and the intensity of Walcott's talent, such as Naipol's, that they, coming from nowhere, not just absorbed the English culture. Their desire to find themselves a place and find a world order was such that instead of finding themselves asylum in the English culture they drilled through it and came out the other side, even more strangers than they were.
	-- [They did not level themselves with a powerful tradition, but only hardened themselves and strengthened even more their uniqueness. That is, before this uniqueness was given to them, simply by virtue of their origins -- Caribbean influence, African, Indian -- and later it became real individualism. Yet Walcott and Naipol write in English exactly because of the same Big White People.]
	-- These are already not the same people. And that world is already not the same. Thanks to such people as Walcott and Naipol, by the way. And Derek received a classical English education. A classical colonial English education.
	-- [By the way, this St. Lucia is an amazing place. The gross state product per head is ten times less than in the States, yet literacy is ninety percent, a high percent in universal terms.]
	-- Derek studied in the University of the West Indies, later he was hanging around in England, there were many different paths. Yet his zone, his sphere became poetry.
	-- [An utterly individualist activity. But Walcott is also a playwright.]
	-- He was occupied in writing poetic dramas, because a) he was interested in the theatre and b) in order to give work for many talented people amongst his countrymen. In his plays there is much music, calypso, whatever. Such a temperament. And also the passions there are absolutely Shakespearean.
	-- [It seems to me that Derek Walcott is a plenipotentiary representative of a certain Pleiad, characteristic of our time. First of all, he answers in the best possible way to your lines: "If you happen to be born in an empire, it is best to live in a remote province near the sea." Here is Walcott, here is Naipol, who are both from the Caribbean Islands. The previous year it was Nadine Gordimer from South Africa who received the Nobel Prize. In South Africa there is also Kotzie, whom you yourself called more than once one of the best English language prose writers. There is Salman Rushdie. In Stockholm, it is rumoured, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney is discussed as a candidate. All this is prose and poetry in English, and all of them are not English people, not Americans, all are outsiders. What is happening?]
	-- What is happening is what Yates mentioned before: "The centre cannot hold." And it indeed cannot hold any more.
	-- [An empire shines in its ruins?]
	-- Not so much the ruins as the outskirts. And the outskirts are wonderful in that it is maybe the end of the empire, but is also the beginning of the world. The rest of the world. So here in the outskirts of the empire, somewhere in the Caribbean Islands, a person appears, who starts to read Shakespeare. Shakespeare and all the rest. He does not see legions, but he sees waves and palm trees, and coconuts on the beach, like helmets of a dead landing soldier.
	-- [Walcott writes thus: "The sea is our history." And in another place: "My people appeared like the sea, without a name, without horizons." And we, by the way, also have, in a north-western corner of another empire, another sea, which also has a fundamental significance, if we judge by your poem:

		I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshes, by
		Zinc-grey waves, that always came running in twos
		And hence all the rhymes, hence that faded voice,
		Curling among them, like wet hair.*(1)

	If the outskirts of an empire of which the centre no longer "holds", an empire which is collapsing, like ours, or that has already collapsed, like the British empire, if all that is so productive, shouldn't we wait for surprises from the Russian outskirts?]
	-- Let's hope something of this kind will happen. Although our outskirts are not distant from each other geographically, they constitute some continental whole. This is why such a feeling of being alienated from the centre does not exist. And this is, in my opinion, a very important feeling. And English speaking people should thank geography for the fact that these islands exist. Yet still in the Russian case, too, something of this kind could happen, we should not dismiss it.
	-- [It seems to me that the youth of this culture, which -- together with its traditionality -- a person from the outskirts of the empire carries, is linked with an explicable courage, not to say impertinence. Here, for example, is Walcott who ventured into an epic: his 32 pages "Omeros" is a transferring of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into Caribbean manner. An epic in our time -- is it not anachronistic?]
	-- I don't know. It is not for the writer. It is not for the reader.
	-- [Why is it that a contemporary epic does not, or almost does not, exist?]
	-- This is because nobody has guts. Because we are more and more drawn towards the smaller forms: it is all natural. People haven't got time -- neither the writer nor the reader. And of course in attempting an epic there is an instant of impudence. Yet "Omeros" is a remarkable poem, at places it is of a fantastic nature. But the real epic of Walcott is "Another Life".
	-- [And a traditional question: to what extent is Derek Walcott acquainted with Russian literature?]
	-- He knows Pasternak and Mandelshtam perfectly well, in English translations, and depends on them internally very much. To a certain extent he himself as a poet is placed between them. Walcott is a poet of texture, of detail, and this makes him close to Pasternak. And on the other hand -- the despairing tenor of Mandelshtam... I remember that time in Oklahoma where we sat, chatting and drinking. The thing was that every member of the jury was given a bottle of "Ballantine" whisky, every day, and Derek at that time already didn't drink and gave it to me. And I entertained him by translating from memory, line by line, various poems by Mandelshtam. I remember what a strong impression this line made on him: "In the rustling of hundred rouble notes by the lemon Neva/ Never, never did a gypsy woman dance for me." Derek was simply beyond himself with enthusiasm. And later he composed a poem, dedicated to my humble person, where he makes use of these lines. He also helped me more than once in translating my own poems with me.
	-- [I think that what attracts Walcott to the poems of Mandelshtam and to your poems is their classicist nature. It is not for nothing that he himself is so drawn towards antiquity and he likes so much to compare his archipelago to the Greek archipelago.]
	-- This is true, he has a notably strong tendency to think about his archipelago, the West Indies, as resembling Greece. He turns every page, like a wave, backwards.


*	From the book: "Iosif Brodskii: trudy i dni" ("Joseph Brodsky: Labours and Days"), edited by Lev Loseff and Peter Vail (Moscow, 1998).
*	Translated from the Russian by Anat Vernitski, 1998. Reproduced with permission. (-- S. W.)

*	1. A poem from the 1976 cycle "A Part of Speech"; here is the author's auto-translation from the book "A Part of Speech", 1980:

	I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland
	by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on
	in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice
	that ripples between them like hair still moist,
    if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow,
    the helix picks out of them no sea rumble
    but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle
    on the burner, boiling---lastly, the seagull's metal
    cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region
    is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision.
    Only sounds needs echo and dreads its lack.
    A glance is accustomed to no glance back.

___
			Conversation of Joseph Brodsky with Adam Mikhnik

	MIKHNIK: Let's talk about Russia, about your threefold experience of Russian "intelligent", Russian poet and Russian Jew.
	BRODSKY: I do not consider myself a "Russian intelligent". This term was born in the 19th century and died in the beginning of the 20th. After 1917, one couldn't be serious when talking about "Russian intelligentsia". A cute beard, pince-nez, passion for (Russian) people?? Long conversations about Russia's fate at the suburban dacha??? Neither me nor my colleagues have never considered ourselves as "intelligentsia", at least for the reason that we have never discussed Russia, its fate or its people among ourselves. We were more interested in Faulkner and Beckett. What would happen to Russia?? What would its fate be?? What is its purpose?? To myself, all that ended with Chaadayev and his definition of Russia as a failure in the history of mankind.
	M: I have always valued high "Russian intelligent" in you. It's interesting that you don't like this definition.
	B: Somebody can call me that, but I think different of myself. I have always tried to define myself in clear terms: am I courageous or cowardly, greedy or generous, honest with women or not.
	M: There is no riot against the power in your works. You have never been a dissident.
	B: Adam, you are wrong. It just means that I have never fallen so low as to cry "Down with the Soviets!"
	M: Were you an exception in your circle of friends, in that sense?
	B: My colleagues were the same. At best, power was a theme for anecdotes and jokes. But to be serious about it?? It was clear that it was evil. If only my generation had any illusions, they were gone after 1956. Everything became clear then. I was 16. The 20th century cannot teach us. In the 19th c., there was an idea of people, the idea of justice that could be reached. In the 20th, the idea of people as a bearer of truth is just infantile. Russia has a history that nobody can comprehend. When we are talking about the cruelties of a ruling power we do not say the whole truth. It is not only that thousands were killed but also that lives of the millions were altered. Whole generations were brought up in the total unjustice. The very thought of initiative was rooted out, the instinct of activity has disappeared, it was castrated. I think, the same thing happened to Russian people as to Russian intelligentsia in the last century: the feeling of a complete impotence.
	M: Isaac Berlin noticed once that there is a tradition of Maupassant in European literature -- literature as a storytelling. And Russian literary tradition is a fulfilment of a certain mission. When I am listening to you, I see that you say one thing and write something very different.
	B: The main enemy of humanity is not communism, socialism or capitalism, but the vulgarity of a human heart, of a human mind. For example, Marx's vulgar imagination, and vulgar imagination of his Russian successors.
	M: When did you meet with antisemitism?
	B: At school. A class book has your name in it, last name, date of birth, and nationality. I am Jewish, one hundred percent. One cannot be Jewish more than I am. My father, my mother, no doubt about them. Without any foreign blood. But I think, I am Jewish not only for that reason. I know that there is a true absolutism in my views. And. speaking of religion, when forming the idea of a Supreme Being for myself, I would say that G-d is a violence. Isn't the G-d from the Old Testament the same?
	M: What do the words "All poets are Jews" by Tsvetaeva mean (to you)?
	B: That one can't be jealous for their position. They are aliens to people around them.
	M: Tell me, should Poles be afraid of Russia?
	B: I think that Russia is finished as a superpower. And, as a state that can put a pressure on its neighbors, it has no future. And, for a long time, it won't be having this future. Russian territory will shrink. I think, you can leave the game table. Everything is finished.

		Warsaw.

				<1995>

*	Adopted from: Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw, February 1995

*	Translated and submitted by Dmitry Gorelikov


___
			Радиоинтервью с Иосифом Бродским

	Интервью, которое Вы сейчас прочтете, я взял у И. Бродского в
Лондоне в 1981 году. Посвящено интервью поэту Джону Донну, очередной
юбилей которого тогда отмечали в Англии. В ХХ веке Джон Донн -- едва ли
не самый модный в англоязычном мире поэт-классик. Несколько слов о
Донне. Он жил в последней трети шестнадцатого/первой трети семнадцатого
столетий. Жизнь прожил бурно: был узником Тауэра, перебежчиком из
католической в англиканскую церковь, поэтом, настоятелем лондонского
собора Святого Павла. О великих поэтах часто говорят, что они опережают
свое время. Если понимать эту фразу буквально, то можно прикинуть,
насколько тот или иной классик и впрямь опередил свое время. Судя по
отношению к Донну литературной критики и читателей, он был впереди
своего времени на два столетия. Окончательно его репутация утвердилась
в ХIХ веке. В Англии, помимо стихов Донна, регулярно переиздается
трехтомник его проповедей. Русский