Watermark has been described as a "love letter to Venice"... Nuff said, then, about why I read it.

It's by Joseph Brodsky (1940-96). Born Iosif Brodskiy in what was then Leningrad, his insistence on writing poetry soon brought him up against the Soviet authorities. Regarded as "a rebel and a parasite", he was arrested in 1964, and subjected to what sounds like a completely Kafkaesque trial. There's a complete transcript here. But this is a representative exchange:

Judge: How long did you work at the factory?
Brodskiy: A year.
J: Your position?
B: A metal cutter.
J: And what is your occupation in general?
B: Poet, poet-translator.
J: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet?
B: No one. (Unprovoked) And who put me in the ranks of humanity?
J: Did you study it?
B: What?
J: How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an institute of higher learning … where they prepare … teach …
B: I did not think that it is given to one by education.
J: By what then?
B: I think it is … from God.

The accused was sentenced to five years' internal exile, with hard labour, in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia, but after protests from Soviet and Western intellectuals, he was released in 1965, having served 18 months. He returned to Leningrad, but the authorities continued to regard him as a thorn in the flesh, and sent him into permanent external exile in 1972. He settled in the United States. A contemporary account regarded the expulsion as puzzling: "The Soviets have sometimes 'invited' Jews and non-Jews whom they regard as troublemakers to leave Russia. But Brodsky -- who is Jewish -- is not an active dissident, a Zionist or a political poet. Last month he was simply summoned by the Soviet secret police and told that he must leave Russia or 'things would become worse.' It was a threat that could not be ignored. He was forced to leave behind his elderly parents and his young son."

From there, as a poet and essayist, he rapidly became part of the Establishment. He taught at several universities, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, and became US Poet Laureate in 1991.


Dhaka again. Modelling the "Venice of the East"

According to Ann Ljunggren, whose book chapter on this work is full of really interesting detail, Watermark was commissioned by the consortium Venezia Nuova with the aim of drawing attention to Venice's ecological challenges. It first appeared in 1989, translated from the original English into Italian, and entitled Fondamenta degli Incurabili (Embankment of the Incurables). It was then published in the US in 1992 under the title Watermark.

And while we're on the subject of chronology, Brodsky opens by telling us that he made his first visit to Venice when he was 32. That means it was 1972 (the same year he was expelled from the USSR, remember). He initially came for the sake of a Venetian acquaintance. Nothing came of that relationship, but for the next 17 years he kept returning, for the sake of the city itself. He always visited in winter ("I would never come here in summer," he says, "not even at gunpoint").

This is essentially a book of snippets, very much non-linear. I struggled a little initially. I'm not a natural fragments person, and I was a little disconcerted by the tendency of the narrative to run off at tangents. However, unlike John Julius Norwich -- who remained resolutely sceptical ("There are, it must be said, occasional felicities... But none of these things really compensates for the pages of pretentious claptrap") -- I eventually fell under its watery spell.

For a start, Brodsky's language (and remember he's not writing in his mother tongue) is really interesting.

Examples:

-- The vaporetto that pulls in at the railway station jetty is "something of a cross between a sardine can and a sandwich... The boat's slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious. On both sides, knee-deep in pitch-black water, stood the enormous carved chests of dark palazzi filled with unfathomable treasures -- most likely gold, judging from the low-intensity yellow electric glow emerging now and then from cracks in the shutters."

-- He's particularly good on the aquatic, fish-like properties of the local topography. He highlights "the streets -- narrow, meandering like eels"; "a flounder of a campo with a cathedral in the middle of it, barnacled with saints and flaunting its Medusa-like cupolas". Seen on a map, the city "looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate". A glance though an illuminated window will show you "an octopal chandelier, the lacquered fin of a grand piano". In short, "it is clear that this is a city of fish."



-- "I simply think that water is the image of time... The upright lace of Venetian facades is the best line time-alias-water has left on terra firma anywhere... It is as though space, cognizant here more than any place else of its inferiority to time, answers it with the only property time doesn't possess: with beauty."

-- Extolling the glorious winter light of Venice, he recounts how the sun, "escaping its golden likeness beneath the foot of San Giorgio, sashays over the countless fish scales of the laguna's lapping ripples".

-- Most memorable of all, not to mention succinct, is his attempt to sum up to his editor and surrounding acolytes what Venice is like in winter. He thinks of all the things he might say, but fears they just won't see what he sees, so he says simply: "It's like Greta Garbo swimming."

-- I loved the description of his visit to a palazzo. And I can't help wondering whether the set designers for Kenneth Branagh's A Haunting in Venice read this book... Just a few snippets, by way of illustration: "A long, poorly lit gallery... large, floor-to-ceiling, dark-brownish oil paintings... the lightest hue was wine red... a state of perpetual evening... a room which appeared to be a cross between the library and the study of a seventeenth-century gentleman... the gentleman's century could even have been the sixteenth... a long succession of empty rooms... drapery, mirrors, and dust... reasonably ghostly... now it became unreasonably so... a gigantic yet uncovered four-poster bed... the monstrous stucco cloud of putti..."

-- The descriptions of the palazzi exteriors are memorable, too. This, for example: "The whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky." Or again: "On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or up-turned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky."



So there's lots of creative phrasing that leaps out from the page. And there are not too many of the sexist red rags that reflect his era...

Plus we gain access to some fascinating little episodes.

The one about Ezra Pound really stands out. Brodsky is invited to meet his wife, Olga Rudge. "[She] lifted her sharp finger, which slid into an invisible mental groove, and out of her pursed lips came an aria the score of which has been in the public domain at least since 1945. That Ezra wasn't a Fascist; that they were afraid the Americans... would put him in the chair; that he knew nothing about what was going on; that there were no Germans in Rapallo... Be polite and don't interrupt the lady; it's garbage, but she believes it..." Susan Sontag, Brodsky's fellow-visitor, is having none of it, though. What the Americans object to, she says, is not Pound's twice-a-month broadcasts from Rome but his anti-Semitism. "I saw the corundum needle of the old lady's finger once again hitting the groove. On this side of the record was: 'One should realize that Ezra was not an anti-Semite...'" And Brodsky concludes the segment like this: "We turned to the left of the house and two minutes later found ourselves on the Fondamenta degli Incurabili." He says this designation goes back to plague times. Ljunggren says it refers to the place where, from the early 16th century, incurable syphilis patients were housed. Either way, the motif connects with the incorrigible, the inexorable, the irremediable...

There's a sad little anecdote about W.H. Auden as well. As Ljunggren remarks: "Auden’s face, laughing and weeping at the same time, is the last image preceding the invasion of the fog into the city, veiling the scenery."



Whereas some books need no critical apparatus to help you peer into their depths, this is definitely one that repays further study.

Courtesy of Rene Alladaye, for example, I learnt that part of Brodsky's affection for Venice in winter is due to the reminder it offers him of his home city, St Petersburg. Directed to Brodsky's 1976 essay, Less Than One, we read of his recollections of that northern Venice, and immediately see the connections: "Once upon a time there was a little boy... And there was a city. The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. With an immense gray river that hung over its distant bottom like the immense gray sky over that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully elaborated facades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint of a giant mollusk called civilization. Which ceased to exist... The wide river lay white and frozen like a continent's tongue lapsed into silence, and the big bridge arched against the dark blue sky like an iron palate..."

Alladaye also elucidates some of the literary references: "The shape of the city, Brodsky will be concerned to show us throughout the book, is defined at least as much by its pictorial and literary representation as by its architects."

Important here too is the inter-lingual encounter, to which Brodsky himself has contributed. He wrote Watermark in English, but he also wrote a number of poems in Russian dedicated to Venice, and as Ljunggren points out, Watermark draws in many places on these poetic texts, as well as on images from his essay on St Petersburg (entitled A Guide to a Renamed City), which he transfers to Venice.

Watermark is therefore "a continuation of the larger tradition of Russian Venetian poetry going back to the nineteenth century". (An example here is The Venetian Night, from 1832, in which a text by Ivan Kozlov is beautifully set to music by Mikhail Glinka.)

The encounter of French and Russian is also very prominent. An early introduction to Venice, for Brodsky, when he was just 26, came in the shape of three short novels by Henri de Regnier (1864-1936), which were translated by the Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin. In Watermark, he tells us: "They were a cross between picaresque and detective novels, and at least one of them... was set in Venice in winter... The book was written in short, page or page-and-a-half chapters. From their pace came the sense of damp, cold, narrow streets through which one hurries in the evening in a state of growing apprehension, turning left, turning right... What mattered for me most at the impressionable stage at which I came across this novel was that it taught me the most crucial lesson in composition; namely, that what makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what. Unwittingly, I came to associate this principle with Venice."

According to Ljunggren, Regnier was much more broadly influential, and contributed to a change in direction for Russian symbolism (his work was translated not only by Kuzmin but by various other "French-oriented Russian symbolists"). The Regnier novels that Brodsky refers to were probably from the Academia edition: "It was this cultural endeavour, a concrescence of Regnier and Kuzmin, a manifestation of the Russian-French modernism, that provided Brodsky with the images to which he would return decades later to recreate his version of the cumulative 'imaginary West' of the late 1960s in Leningrad."



Which brings us to the aspect that resonated with me most, I suppose. Brodsky's Watermark should be read "as a summation of his whole life journey between cultures, from the counterculture of Leningrad in the 1960s to his status as a cosmopolitan cultural personality, an internationally acclaimed Anglo-American essayist and a Russian poet". In this sense, Brodsky's arrival in Venice is also a kind of return: "Arrival and homecoming paradoxically coincide; arrival does not entail returning to his native Leningrad, which Brodsky never did, but to a place he regarded as the prototype of the visions conveyed by Westernized Russian culture."

Ljunggren reflects that Brodsky tried to resist the role of "exiled writer", and his whole career, from the poetry of the 1970s to Watermark, reveals a transition from a state of exile to the fluidity of cosmopolitanism: "The dominant themes of the earlier poetry of the 1970s -- exile, nostalgia and separation -- are inverted in Watermark: it is no longer a matter of loss but of retrieval and integration into the family of anglophone literature."

Brodsky is buried in Venice, on the cemetery island of San Michele. Which is only fitting for one who wrote: "As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown."