The Russian Auden and the Russianness of Auden

One of Joseph Brodsky’s primary mentors, W.H. Auden constituted a key influence on the Russian poet. At the same time, Brodsky found Auden extremely difficult to translate. Rendering Auden’s “Stop all the Clocks” in Russian, Brodsky does not preserve Auden’s form, opting instead for iambic hexameter, a meter not frequently used by Russian poets in Brodsky’s time. I argue that the difficulty of translating Auden is that “Stop All the Clocks” recalls too much the Russian dol’nik – for the post-emigration Brodsky, the most “neutral” meter. Thus, problems in translation can arise not only because of prosodic differences between poets and languages, but even when two poets happen to be metrically similar, because a translator may seek through formal distinctiveness to pay homage to the author of the original. I further show that Brodsky’s metrical choice, i.e., iambic hexameter, is not accidental and represents a complex blend of semantic links to various poets and texts, including an echo of Brodsky’s own earlier poem devoted to his mentor Anna Akhmatova. What is the function of rhythm in poetry? What esthetic ends are served by the formal patterns […]? No doubt the formal organization of meter is determined in a complex way by the interacting demands of esthetic function and linguistic form. But how? Kiparsky (1977: 246)