【Editor's Note】
Watermark is the only long prose work written by Nobel laureate Brodsky in a separate book, covering all aspects of Venice: from waterways, streets and architecture to politics, people, customs, and traditional cuisine, telling the charm of the city's natural and humanistic aspects.
This article, excerpted from Watermark – Venice, is Brodsky's depiction of "the winter light that belongs to the city." It is published by The Paper with the authorization of Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Winter light! The winter light that belongs only to the city! It has extraordinary performance, can enhance the resolution of your eyesight to the precision of the microscope - the pupils, especially gray and dark yellow-honey yellow pupils, will make any Hasselblad camera lens bow down, and it can also make your subsequent memories clear enough to rival National Geographic magazine. The sky was blue; the sun, escaping its golden portrait at the foot of San Giorgio, swaying above countless fish scales in the overlapping ripples of the Lake le; behind you, under the colonnade of the Doge's Palace, a group of stout lads in fur coats were pulling Mozart's 13th serenade faster and faster, just for you, for you sitting on a white recliner, while you squinted at the maddening opening of the pigeons in the huge central square as a chessboard. The espresso coffee at the bottom of your cup seems to be the only black spot within miles of the glass. This is the noon time here. In the morning, the daylight hits your window glass with its crisp chest, prying your eyes open like a shell, and it runs ahead of you, carelessly stroking through arcades and colonnades with its long beam of light, red brick chimney after red brick chimney after red brick chimney, saint and lion after saint and lion—like a little boy who runs fast with a stick to fiddle with an iron door in a park or garden. "Draw it!" "Draw it!" It shouts at you; either it mistakes you for some Canaletto or Cabachio or Guardi, or it doesn't trust your retina's ability to remember what it finds useful, let alone your brain's ability to absorb it. Perhaps the latter may speak of the former. Maybe they're synonymous. Perhaps art is just an organism rebelling against its memory limits. In any case, you obey this command, grab your camera, and make up for the lack of your brain cells and your pupils. If the city runs out of cash one day, it can go straight to Kodak for help — or it's going to tax its products like crazy. Similarly, as long as this place exists, as long as the winter light shines above it, Kodak stock is the best investment.
At sunset, all cities look wonderful, but some cities are even more wonderful than others. The reliefs became softer, the columns became fuller, the tops became curled, the cornices became more decisive, the spires became more prominent, the niches became deeper, the believers became more lazy, and the angels became more ethereal. In the streets, the sky began to darken, but the Avenue Of Fontainemento was still daylight, and in that huge mirror of liquid, motorboats, water buses, gondolas, dinghies, and barges, "like scattered old shoes," ravaged the Baroque and Gothic facades in a frenzy, and did not spare you, or the reflection of a passing cloud. "Draw it down." The winter light whispered, stopping categorically on the brick walls of a hospital, or finally reaching its home after this long journey through the universe, which was heaven on the gable wall of the church of San Zaccaria. After the daylight rests for another hour or so in the marble shell of the church of Santa Zaccaria, you will feel its tiredness, and the earth is turning its other cheek to the still radiant sun. This is the purest winter light. It carries neither heat nor energy, but simply emits light and leaves the light somewhere in the universe, or on a nearby Stratus cloud. The only remaining ambition of its particles is to reach an object, large or small, and make it visible. It is an intimate light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tipporo or Tintoretto. The city lingers in it, enjoying its touch and the infinite caresses that come from it. After all, an object is something that makes infinity private.
And this object may be a small monster with the head of a lion and the body of a dolphin. The latter is coiled in a circle, and the former has fangs. It may decorate an entrance, or simply appear on a wall without any apparent purpose, and the absence of purpose makes it unusually easily recognizable. For people of a certain industry, a certain age, there is nothing more recognizable than a lack of purpose. And the same is true of the fusion of two or more features or characteristics, not to mention the fusion of two genders. Basically, all these nightmare creatures—dragons, drippers, basilisks, sphinxes with female breasts, winged lions, Kerpalos, Minotaurs, centaurs, lion-headed sheep-bodied monsters—come to us from mythology (and, appropriately, they should have the status of classical surrealism), they are our self-portraits, in a sense, they foreshadow the genetic memory of the evolution of species. Not surprisingly, here, in a city that originates from water, they abound. Besides, they don't have anything Freud, nothing inferior/unconscious. Given the nature of human reality, the interpretation of dreams is a synonymous repetition and, at best, may justify it only by the ratio of day to night. Although, I doubt very much whether this democratic principle is feasible in nature, where nothing enjoys a majority. Even water cannot, though it reflects and refracts everything, including itself, alternating between form and content, sometimes gentle, sometimes terrifying. That's why the winter light here has such properties; that's why it loves little monsters as much as it does little angels. Presumably, cherubs are also part of the evolution of species. Otherwise, the opposite is true, because if we had taken a census of them in the city, they might have outnumbered the natives.
"Watermark - The Soul of Venice", by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Zhang Sheng, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, July 2016.