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Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky – review

T he poet Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and expelled from his homeland in 1972, after which he settled in the US. Perhaps it was his memories of the canals of the city of his birth that made him keep returning to Venice . He first visited aged 32, and by the time he wrote Watermark in 1989 he had stayed in the city 17 times, always in December. He explains that at New Year's Eve he always longed to be near water, to see "a wave hitting the shore at midnight. That, to me, is time coming out of water". This essay is Brodsky's brief yet memorable paean to this city of water, the city that came closest to his notion of Eden. It is, he says, "the greatest masterpiece our species produced". He describes its atmosphere as "part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers" and the canal-side facades as like "upright lace". In a palazzo he is struck by how decay makes time tangible: "every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time". Memory, death, love, beauty, dreams – Brodsky touches on all of these in this wonderfully evocative and uniquely beautiful book.

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Watermark: An Essay on Venice

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'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

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Watermark: An Essay on Venice

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A collection of wisdom, a focus on the universal

Brodsky's Intimate Exploration of How Places We Seek Often Map Who We Are

"I'd never possess this city; but then I'd never had any such aspiration."

There should be a word for places that are not home but have tenets of home. Familiarity without contempt. Shall we call it "A home away"?

Venice was Joseph Brodsky's  (May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996)  home away. Watermark: An Essay on Venice maps this Nobel laureate's magnificent relationship to this jeweled city. Born in Russia in 1940, Brodsky was exiled from his country in 1972 and settled in New York. However, like John Keats, buried in Rome, Brodsky's final resting place is Venice.   I struggled with my verb tense here. I used present tense without consideration, as in "Keats and Brodsky are  buried in Italy." But, of course, they were  buried, right? Are they still there? The issue of  where the dead exist to the living confounds me.     I recently read that when English writer Peter Mayle died in 2018 he was buried in his beloved Provence  rather than his birthplace England. Maybe our body is merely located where our soul already is.

In Watermark,  Brodsky gestures at the space adjacent and invites us to sit: "Here," he lifts our chin, "This is my Venice."

The boat's slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious. On both sides, knee-deep in pitch-black water, stood the enormous carved chests of dark palazzi filled with unfathomable treasures—most likely gold, judging from the low-intensity yellow electric glow emerging now and then from cracks in the shutters. The overall feeling was mythological, cyclopic, to be precise. I entered that infinity I beheld on the steps of the stazione and now was moving among its inhabitants, along the bevy of dormant cyclopses reclining in the black water, now and then raising and lowering an eyelid.

Poet Mary Oliver pushed herself to "keep attention on eternity. " My singular focus on the eternal is a feeling of empathy, a warm, generous expansion into the world.

For Brodsky, it isn't the familiarity of Venice that allowed him to expand into that infinity; it was the unknown, the anonymity.

I was standing there waiting for the only person I knew in that city to meet me. She was pretty late. Every traveler knows this fix: this mixture of fatigue and apprehension. It's the time of staring down the clock faces and timetables, of scrutinizing varicose marble under your feet, of inhaling ammonia. [...] Save for the yawning bartender and immobile Buddha-like matrona at the cash register, there was no one in sight.

In this inconspicuous setting, this pause of life, what film critic Roger Ebert called "the pastime of Being By Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One Knows Where to Find Me," Brodsky blends into Venice. Through his senses, sight, touch , and smell, he becomes "smitten by the feeling of utter happiness."   Roger Ebert, one of my favorite humans and writers, coincidentally found his anonymous self in Venice. In his memoirs, the film critic takes us there:     "In Venice, there is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps crossing the bridge, there is a landing, and a little café has found a perch there. In front of this café, there is one table with two chairs."   Read more in Ebert's Life, Itself .

One recognizes oneself in certain elements; by the time I was taking this smell in on the steps of the stazione, hidden dramas, and incongruities long since had become my forte.

Travel is a means to finding ourselves or, instead, to unearthing parts hitherto hidden. The most significant travel experiences are less about going and more about existing in a pause that allows self-reflection.

Where, Brodsky argues, better than Venice? Venice is many, many things, but its blood is water. Surrounding, palliative, destructive, reclaiming water.

Water, and thus Venice itself, is a mirror that can tell us more about who we are. Brodsky desires to paint Venice; he (perhaps wittingly) paints himself instead.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. Perhaps this idea was even of my own manufacture, but now I need to remember. In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles, and ripples, and—as I am a Northerner—for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in a somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. […] I am looking for either a cloud or the crest of a wave hitting the shore at midnight. That, to me, is a time coming out of water, and I stare at the lace-like pattern it puts on the shore, not with gypsy-like knowing but with tenderness and with gratitude.

Perhaps because he was exiled from his own country, Joseph Brodsky romances the notion of possession. He suggests he would never possess Venice. Venice does not exist within him. It exists apart from him. "A departure from this place always feels final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever."

Maira Kalman opened her book The Principles of Uncertainty by asking, "How can I tell you Everything in my Heart?" By sweeping his pen on these pages, Brodsky illuminates the anonymity of arrival, the sensory beauty of being there, and the separation felt at departure.

But does he 'tell' us Venice? No, no one can.

Ultimately, that is the power of a faraway home. Its separateness. I cannot express what my distant home means because I cannot now reach it. I carry its residue on me, its watermark.

Venice is static, while we are not. It possesses us, not the other way around. Brodsky looked to "simply be" in Venice. It warms my heart that he achieved that upon his death.

Enjoy the beautiful brushstrokes and scenery of Watermark  alongside John Steinbeck's journey of self-discovery taken at the end of his life, Hemingway's self-formation in Paris , and the brief, powerful essay on going nowhere from travel writer Pico Iyer. Or turn to my study of the feeling of home and the alienating features of the memory.

Ellen Vrana

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Watermark (FSG Classics) Paperback – June 1, 1993

In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of 48 short chapters―each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly 20 years)― Watermark associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. In doing so, the book also reveals a subject―and an author―readers have never before seen.

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date June 1, 1993
• Dimensions 4.75 x 0.36 x 7.75 inches
• ISBN-10 0374523827
• ISBN-13 978-0374523824
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“We read Watermark enraptured by its gallant attempt to distill a precious meaning from life's experience--to make a spot on a globe a window into universal circumstance, and to fashion of one's personal chronic tourism a crystal whose facets reflect an entire life, with exile and ill health glinting at the edges of planes whose direct glare is sheer beauty.” ― John Updike, The New Yorker “Praising Venice and its architecture as a triumph of the visual, the Nobel laureate uses his visits there as a touchstone to meditate on life's unpredictability, and on the appetite for beauty, death, myth, and modern art . . . In his wayward forays amid canals, streets, and cathedrals barnacled with saints, the eternal Venice shimmers through the fog, battered yet resplendent.” ― Publishers Weekly “Brodsky's description of his 'version of Paradise' has all the vividness and associative brilliance of a lyric poem . . . Watermark is a gracefully idiosyncratic work, one that obliquely mingles the author's own self-portrait with that of 'this Penelope of a city, weaving her patterns by day and undoing them by night, with no Ulysses in sight. Only the sea.'” ― James Marcus, The New York Times Book Review “[This is a] short prose-exercise by Nobelist Brodsky about Venice, his many wintertime trips there, and [the city's] enchantment and ironies and visual splendors. Brodsky has piquant ideas about space and time (see his Less Than One ) that lend interesting angles to his Venice-for-visitors: ideas about water, light, and brick ('an alternative order of flesh, not raw of course, but scarlet and made up of small, identical cells. Yet another of the species' self-portraits at the elemental level, be it a wall or a chimney').” ― Kirkus Reviews

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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (June 1, 1993)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374523827
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374523824
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.75 x 0.36 x 7.75 inches
• #1,741 in general Italy Travel Guides
• #4,087 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
• #4,274 in Essays (Books)

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This collection of forty-eight short pieces on Venice showcase Joseph Brodsky at his very best: witty, intelligent, moving and elegant. Looking at every aspect of Venice, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and peopl...

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