6/09/2010

an attempt to subordinate literature to history

Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.

- Joseph Brodsky, from his 1987 Nobel Lecture (translated by Barry Rubin). Read the whole thing here.

2 comments:

Zachariah Wells said...

Spoken like an exile from a Communist state...

Pearl said...

Rubin's idea is interesting. authentic dialogue fed into poetry is a cousin-idea of poems never being fudged but what really happened to the memoir-writing poet.