Joseph Brodsky’s “On the Death of Zhukov”
December 8th, 2007Save as PDF
Joseph Brodsky’s “On the Death of Zhukov”
Years ago, I first read this salute to the WWII Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who commanded the Red Army as it pushed the Wehrmacht relentlessly back into Germany. Brodsky’s verse, a heavily dactylic tetrameter (the stress falls on the first syllable of the four accented words in a line, DUM-da-da) is reminiscent of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – obviously a good strategy for a military poem. Compare “Columns of grandsons, stiff at attention” with “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward” and you get the picture. What I especially love about this poem, in addition to its thrilling cadences when you read it aloud, is the way it captures the tragic dimension of the USSR’s victory over the Nazis, especially the way it treated its heroes when they came home. Written in 1974, when Soviet power was still very much in place, and before the era of perestroika, this was a poem Brodsky most likely could not have written (or, at least, published) had he not emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US in 1972.
The fine translation is by George L. Kline.
On the Death of Zhukov
By Joseph Brodsky
Columns of grandsons, stiff at attention;
gun carriage, coffin, riderless horse.
Wind brings no sound of their glorious Russian
trumpets, their weeping trumpets of war.
Splendid regalia deck out the corpse:
thundering Zhukov rolls toward death’s mansion.
As a commander, making walls crumble,
he held a sword less sharp than his foe’s.
Brilliant maneuvers across Volga flatlands
set him with Hannibal. And his last days
found him, like Pompey, fallen and humbled –
like Belisarius banned and disgraced.
How much dark blood, soldier’s blood, did he spill then
on alien fields? Did he weep for his men?
As he lay dying, did he recall them –
swathed in civilian white sheets at the end?
He gives no answer. What will he tell them,
meeting in hell? “We were fighting to win.”
Zhukov’s right arm, which once was enlisted
in a just cause, will battle no more.
Sleep! Russian history holds, as is fitting,
space for the exploits of those who, though bold,
marching triumphant through foreign cities,
trembled in terror when they came home.
Marshal! These words will be swallowed by Lethe,
utterly lost, like your rough soldier’s boots.
Still, take this tribute, though it is little,
to one who somehow – here I speak truth
plain and aloud – has saved our embattled
homeland. Drum, beat! And shriek out, bullfinch fife!
December 8th, 2007 at 5:32 pm e
John–
The first reaction is just WOW, THANK YOU FOR FINDING ME THIS WONDERFUL POEM.
Let’s re-think the purpose of your web site. There are lots of readers who would like to share your discoveries.
My limited readings of history have sometimes centered on Napoleon’s and the German’s many attempts to overrun the Russian homeland. …Even though I haven’t re-read War & Peace lately.
This poem really goes at it.
Thank you, thank you.
Wally
July 22nd, 2011 at 1:32 am e
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