Volume 35, Number 18 · November 24, 1988
Magic Industry
By Derek Walcott
To Urania
by Joseph Brodsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 174 pp., $14.95
'August,' a Russian émigré poet explained to me, 'is a man in Russian language,' 'so when you say in your poem 'The housemaid, August'….' He groaned. In Russian, the months have gender. Nouns have masculine or feminine endings, but unless they are personified, the months are simply nouns. Of course, in the pastoral tradition there were traditional personifications for the months. May was feminine, a white girl in a white dress in a meadow of white flowers; June vibrated with the furled thunder of the rose, with the opening hearts of its lovers; December was a hoary, icicle-bearded ancient. But these personifications were a calendar's images, and not grammar. If August, in Russian, was a man, what was he to this exiled poet? A wheat-haired worker with a pitchfork on a revolutionary poster?
Review, 4884 words
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