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May 12, 2010
Outlaws, Labels, Nobels
I saw "A room and a half" today - a very beautiful and moving film based loosely on the life of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky was labelled an Anti-Socialist Sponger and a Social Parasite in his native country and as such sentenced to 5 years of internal exile filled with hard labour and 'rehabilitation'. Here is a true transcription of what took place in that courtroom:
Judge: And what is your profession in general?
Brodsky: A poet and a literary translator.
Judge: Who recognised you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humankind?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish school where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn't think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it... comes from God.
Many years later Brodsky won literary acclaim and a Nobel Prize - yet another label, one might say.
Maybe because of his life experience, he understood how unnecessary and harmful labels can be. It is wrong to label a poet Elizabethan or Victorian, he said, for the 'poet's appetite for the infinite' makes him one who has 'got to tell you something about YOUR life no matter when and where he lived his'.
He testified to this truth by his own poetry. And yet, when asked towards the end of life how he thought about himself and where his affinities lied, he said : 'I'm a Jew, a Russian poet and an American essayist.'
Maybe some degree of (self)labelling/describing/identifying is inescapable or even desirable in a healthy human being. I don't know, but I'm curious to know what you think.
Posted by Marzena at May 12, 2010 08:53 PM