Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2026.
Letum non Omnia Finit by David Rigsbee.
The coda to my chapter from Three Teachers: Kizer, Brodsky, and Rorty.
In October 2019, I flew to Florence to spend some time with my daughter Makaiya, who had recently graduated from Harvard Law and needed to decompress before starting her first job as a public defender in Seattle. She was keen on going to Venice, and so we took a train there. She knew my real reason for wanting to go: to take a vaporetto and visit Joseph Brodsky’s grave in the Isola di san Michele, where Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge were also buried, along with Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev. The walled cemetery was not especially well-kept, although there were markers and arrows aplenty to locate the graves of the noble and noteworthy.
We first found Ezra Pound’s grave and spent a few minutes in a photo op, but I was more interested in finding Joseph. Makaiya first spotted the tombstone, and I hurried over to take a look. I had seen photos online, but these did not do it justice in its isolation and semi-neglect. I plucked a flower from someone else’s plot and lay it at the stone, which had his name, first in Russian, then life-dates, then “Joseph Brodsky” in English. A stack of three short lines, as if trying to be a tercet. It’s said that Boris Yeltsin sent boxes of roses to adorn the gravesite but that they wound up at the grave of Pound instead. Both were buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery. On the reverse of the tombstone there is a legend in Latin: Letum non Omnia Finit. Not everything ends in death. Another photo op showed me standing behind the tombstone, looking over and across his space. I remember standing there a long time, welcoming the feelings of care and regret. Nor did I forget Joseph’s remark: “For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.'” I looked older than I felt on that day.
A postcard once came in the mail. There was Botticelli’s profile portrait of Dante. On the reverse, he had written, “This caught my eye. It looks like you, don’t you think?—Joseph.” His reverence for Dante was in line with his respect for the Greats and, to a large degree, the institutions that bound them. One had only to glance at the table of contents of his Collected Poems in English: a roster of classical personages to rival that of his beloved Cavafy. Behind this was the overarching theme of empire, naturally, but that empire took many forms, the most important of which was language.
On the one hand, one could never, in Jameson’s phrase, escape “the prison-house of language.” But on the other, poets could build on it. He liked to recite Auden’s lines from ”In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “Time… Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives…” “Wystan never wrote anything truer,” he said. If time does anything of the sort, that would mean that time itself was subordinate to language, the very thing that marks humanity off from the rest of nature. Nature, as a result, needn’t take center stage, nor need it lay claim to importance as a background for self-examination, the way it does for the Romantic poets, to whom Joseph was not particularly drawn. However, there is one exception, his poem, “The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn,” an example of magnificence in which the cry from the soaring raptor is the “apotheosis of pure sound.”
The poem, likewise, is soaring. It’s perhaps as close as he gets to a religion of poetry, but the religion also dovetails with Dante, who not only plumbs the depths with Virgil, but flies through outer space with the spirit of Beatrice on a mission to locate the source, God. Unlike Dante, the hawk doesn’t find God, only weather and the earth in rotation. The hawk doesn’t speak either. Its brain is the size of a berry but its “vision” is vision. Its cry is the basis of the language it foretells, though it’s not built to acquire a language that ultimately evolves to offer poetry, the ultimate. There is a paradox embedded in the reasoning that touches all poets.
Joseph often spoke of Dante in these reverential terms. At the time, I only knew the Florentine through John Ciardi’s popular translation of the Inferno. Few of us read beyond, but we intuited (or so we thought) the rest. There was perhaps a basis for taking on what is otherwise an incomplete assignment. The Inferno was graphic; it seized you with its demonic hooks, and you identified with both the sins and the crazy punishments. The Purgatorio was more of the same, but the promise torn from the souls in hell was still in effect for Purgatory’s lucky characters. By the time you got to the Paradiso, it was felt, the journey became more abstract and gauzy, one bubble-trapped soul after another, “warbling hymns,” in Milton’s double-edged phrase, and making discourses on Thomas Aquinas.
Be that as it may, I had begun translating the Paradiso, at the suggestion of Makaiya, who thought it a fitting project for the depressed. I had retired from teaching by then and was recovering from the breakup of an 18-year marriage to my own Beatrice, who also happened to be poet Carolyn Kizer’s daughter, Jill.
We had remained friends and had joint interest in the upbringing of Makaiya, but we were set, both sorrowfully, I think, on different paths. It was, in Joseph’s terms, grief canceling reason. Cavafy’s remark lurked in the back of my thoughts: “In the dissolute life of my youth the desires of my poetry were being formed, the scope of my art was being plotted. This is why my repentances were never stable. And my resolutions to control myself, to change lasted for two weeks at the very most.” The breakup with Jill was but an update of my past failures, now set squarely before me, and I felt the need of a sustaining literary project.
I knew that Joseph had taken up translation very early on in his career, and he had much to say about the implications of going from one language to the other. There was the apples-and-oranges issue between Russian and English, for example. Russian was an inflected language. Its beauty and its tools for establishing beauty were built-in: not so much in English. Under these circumstances, what could it even mean to undertake a translation? It would be a golem of a text.
In the case of his own poems, Joseph insisted that everything be translated, especially the form, even if that form didn’t correspond to anything native. He was militant on this point. He was more original when it came to translating other poets. For instance, he offered the idea that Cavafy’s work practically cried out for translation because the dandified voices of his speakers brought forth the impression that they were already alienated. So what better way to get this sense across than to suggest that they were speaking across barriers historical, psychological, political, and linguistic?
There was no unmediated voice. Even the cri de coeur was mediated, its source buried somewhere under the rubble of history. Joseph mentioned that Dante was in on the joke: his Pilgrim was after all an alter ego, having been translated from the historical self into a character. What’s more, there was the problem of the self-defeating premise, namely the fact that the Dante character admits in the first canto of the Paradiso that this task, though necessary, is only an approximation, a fool’s errand. It fails before it starts. We are not constructed to comprehend what he experiences, and so his tale short-circuits.
To reach heaven is promised, but having reached it we have no means to express what we’ve experienced. What then of the promise? Joseph said that the paradox was not limited to translation, to Dante, or indeed to any poet. It was inherent to poetry itself, which was situated on a fault-line that changed aspect every which way you turned, but that was nevertheless always there.
You have to be on good terms with the silence on the other side so that you could gesture in its direction, solicit the silent void as background radiation impinging at every point on articulation, no matter how articulate the speaker. One could hardly imagine a more articulate speaker than Joseph, whether spurting the implications of paradox in the poetry of Donne and Eliot or simply making a pointed witticism whose miniature delivery ironically expanded the vastness of its meaning. Knowing the paradox of expressiveness was there, like death was there, gave one the idea that construction nonetheless counts.
Hence his interest in the sturdy, if old-fashioned, poems of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. He praised the well-constructed, thought it succeeded on the merits. It had the virtue of furniture; it served, and you couldn’t imagine living without it. You couldn’t escape the paradox no matter how many Dantes you sent into the field. Or could you?
He knew that the evolution of poetic form depended on coming to grips with time. You could reconfigure time to make it favor you more. And if that were the case, might you not manipulate it? Confine it to a quotational status, unhook it from mortality? If the beauty of a poem inclined you to follow this argument, you might as well reverse-engineer Auden’s lines to find that language deifies itself in our hands. No wonder Time worships it and its practitioners. No wonder Time forgives sins. It was wiith the memory of these conversations in mind that I sat down and began translating the Paradiso.
As John reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word.” That’s fine, but it was the second word, the counter-word, that brought poetry into being, along with time and paradox. Joseph was frequently on my mind as I made my way through Dante’s poem because his way of thinking, in its tenacity and reach, headed off at once to the Ultima Thule many poets tend to skip on their way to the made thing—and that destination was something else entirely, something appealing to a hawk, who, if he stopped to think about it would fall, like Icarus, out of the sky. A second postcard followed shortly. It said, “If you want a rose, follow your nose.—Joseph.” On the reverse was another portrait of Dante in profile, the nose prominently Roman.
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others.
In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.