Kabul in Perspective

Abstract

Gerry Smith's precise analysis of the prosody of On the Talks in Kabul helps us to situate the poem in Brodsky's oeuvre and points our attention to specific lines, words, and phrases that stand out. However, it cannot prove the poem to be ironic or, on the contrary, serious. One may fairly ask: do we need to resolve this issue? After all, poetry thrives on ambiguity, often leaving us with two equally plausible yet mutually exclusive interpretations. On the Talks in Kabul, though, is not a poem about subtle emotions-it is a political poem. We as readers seek to resolve the apparent contradictions, to determine where the poet really stands. Before moving to these interpretive questions, I'd like to turn to one of Gerry's formal observations. For the mature Brodsky, he argues, the rhymes of this poem are relatively and even commonplace. It is true that few of the rhymes are anti-grammatical, but I would not disparage them for that reason. In fact, some of the grammatical rhymes seem to me unusually clever. I am thinking not only about enriched rhymes like ot Ararata/fotoapparata (where the preposition is drawn into the rhyme), but also internal rhymes that adumbrate the first word of a rhyme pair: gde mozhno sest' v mersedes i na rovnom meste (which prepares the end rhyme meste/mesti) and mezhdu vami, kozlami, vospitannymi v Islame (which sets up the end rhyme Islame/poslami). More to the point is whether commonplace rhymes (if indeed they are commonplace) necessarily indicate a lack of seriousness. Rhyme is, of course, a cornerstone of Brodsky's poetics (one of many points that link him to Mayakovsky, though he would have been the last to admit this). But I am not convinced that there is a one-to-one correspondence of the type: antigrammatical rhyme = high seriousness, grammatical rhyme = parody/irony/levity, particularly not in the collection Peizazh s navodneniem. After all, the final poem in that book, which surely is intended as a serious poetic credo (in the tradition of Russian pamiatnik poems), relies largely on the same sort of banal and grammatical rhymes as On the Talks in Kabul. And the obviously ironic Priglashenie k puteshestviiu of that same volume also uses unadventurous rhymes (albeit with one exception). In short, the type of rhyme does not seem to reflect the content or spirit of the individual poem. In the oral presentation of his paper (which differed somewhat from his written summary), Gerry seemed to suggest that the poem should ultimately be taken at face value, that, underneath its seeming irony, it truly is an indictment of the Afghans and, more broadly, of everything Eastern. Anyone who has read the essay Flight from Byzantium (cited in Gerry's notes) knows that Brodsky most certainly expressed some uncharitable-to put it mildly-views on the subject of the East. However, it should be remembered that Brodsky's poetic voice (as against the voice of his essays) is astonishingly varied, from the first poems