The Hug

Publication Instance Details #74

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	No	Yes	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Freedom of Speech/Censorship State Violence Genocide
War / Genocide Referenced	Genocide: Holocaust
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Paratext Text	"In memory of Joseph Brodsky"
Notes	This poem is an elegy written in memory of the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky. It traces memories of the first-person speaker's meeting with Brodsky in New York, where a shared meal of dumplings had prompted Brodsky to remember his 18-month incarceration in a forced-labour camp near Arkhangelsk in northern Russia. The poem's explicit reference to Brodsky's served sentence points to questions of censorship and freedom of speech, but also to state violence and oppression. In 1964, Brodsky had been famously tried, and previously sent to mental institutions, for his supposedly idle vocation as a poet; he was expelled from the Soviet Union and made stateless in 1972. The poem also questions the proximity between poetry and politics, noting that poets and politicians ‘embrace’ rarely, e.g. ‘after a massacre’. Here, the poem seems to allude to the Holocaust. This allusion becomes stronger as the poem continues and conquers more German ground. After asking whether great poets like W. H. Auden would have made fine statesmen like Konrad Adenauer had they only been able to give up smoking, Brodsky’s Jewishness is evoked, as he famously bit off the filters of his cigarettes before smoking them, preferring them thus ‘circumcised’. Finally, as the speaker's memories of Brodsky become increasingly interlaced with memories from the previous day—when he had visited the Golden Chamber of the church of St. Ursula in Cologne, Germany, beholding its display of bones from more than 10,000 martyrs—the poem suggests that it was on this day that news of Brodsky’s death reached the speaker, thus causing the two strings memories to be forever interlinked.