I am currently spending a few days in the Italian city of Venice. I spend these days on roaming the city streets and being accompanied by the words of Joseph Brodsky he shared in his essay called Watermark: A Love Letter to Venice written in 1989. By the time Brodsky wrote Watermark he had visited Venice seventeen times, always during wintertime and almost always in December.
Watermark is a special read for me as I am here in Venice also in December and reading Brodsky’s love letter to Venice feels deeply comforting and moving.
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940 in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and died in 1996 in New York City. Following his sentence to five years of hard labour he was forced into exile in 1972 when he was 32 years old, the age at which he started his winter visits to Venice “every Christmas or shortly before”. He would emerge “from a ferry, bus or train carrying his bags heavy with books and typewriter to the threshold of this or that hotel”.
In Watermark Brodsky captures his deep love for Venice. He describes every aspect of the city, its waterways, streets, people, by recalling his memories of Venice of the past two decades veiled in the mist of solitude and melancholy.
Watermark consists of forty-eight short chapters, each depicting a specific episode or event from Brodsky’s visits to Venice. The 1987 Nobel Prize laurate compares Venice to the library when “at night these narrow stoney gennels are like passages between the bookshelves of some immense, forgotten library, and equally quiet.”
All “the books are shut tight, and you guess what they are about only by the names on their spines, under the doorbell.”
For Brodsky Venice is a winter city where “beauty at low temperatures is [still] beauty” and the weather beautifies the city’s features. Brodsky disliked heat and would not come to Venice in summer, “even at gunpoint”. In winter “everything is harder, more stark”, darkish, dimly lit, misty, foggy, melancholic, deeply atmospheric. A winter stay in Venice for Brodsky is a time spent on “reading and burning electricity all day long, (…), [on] thoughts and coffee, listening to the BBC World Service, going to bed early.”
“The winter light in this city! It has the extraordinary property of enhancing your eye’s power of resolution to the point of microscopic precision. (…) The sky is brisk blue; the sun, escaping its golden likeness beneath the foot of San Giorgio, sashays over the countless fish scales of the Laguna’s lapping ripples (…)”.
Venice reminds Brodsky of his birth city, also known for the canals and being surrounded by water, namely Saint Petersburg.
Venice is “the city of the eye”, with its Gothic and Moorish elements; it is static, somehow unchanged but its visitors are on the move and ultimately all the visitors depart. “One is” always “finite, a departure from this place always feels final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever”.
Brodsky portrays Venice as the place which returns the anonymity to its visitor allowing self-oblivion and “simply to be”, where “over these years during [Brodsky’s] long stays and brief sojourns, [he has] been, (…) both happy and unhappy in nearly equal measures”. Venice is the place where one has time to reflect, time to feel satisfied with one’s loneliness. Those stays in Venice were for Brodsky like a sort of soul-healing medicine especially during the times of upheaval.
The inspiration for Brodsky’s fascination with Venice was the book written by the French author, Henri de Reginer called Provincial Entertainments which is set in Venice in winter with dangerous and twilit atmosphere, with descriptions of cold, narrow streets through which one hurries in the evening, and with a constant state of growing apprehension. Throughout his essay he also refers to his various literary acquaintances and friends including Susan Sontag and Anna Akhmatova for whom Italy was “a dream that keeps returning for the rest [one’s] life”.
Brodsky’s reflections on Venice have accompanied me for the last few days. while I am spending my wintertime in Venice during the period of my life that is not the easiest one.
After thirty years since Watermark was published, Brodsky’s words still resonate with the visitors especially when he wrote that Venice is the city where “no matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways” and “you never know as you move through these labyrinths whether you are pursuing a goal or running from yourself.”
I mostly spend my days on strolling and reading. As it was for Brodsky decades ago, Venice is a winter city for me too. I am really happy to find this gem of a book and to some extent to follow in the Joseph Brodsky’s footsteps.
“A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. (…) Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feels final, leaving it behind is leaving it forever”.
