English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky by Nila Friedberg (review)

Nila Friedberg’s English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky emerges from the synthesis of two research methods with long histories. The first is quantitative poetics or quantitative versification, which seeks to explore poetic trends and individual practice through formal description (as employed by the Russian Symbolist poet Andrej Belyj at the beginning of the twentieth century) and through chronologically organized, corpus-level descriptive statistics (as in the work of Kiril Taranovski, beginning in the 1950s). In this respect, quantitative poetics as a research method precedes by almost a century the distant reading that emerged from the Literature Lab established by Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers at Stanford University in the twenty-first century. The second methodological anchor for F’s book is generative metrics, a rule-based and constraint-based approach to the analysis of poetic practice in the context of generative phonology, popularized in the second half of the twentieth century by such scholars as Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, Paul Kiparsky, and Bruce Hayes, with F following the versions of the latter two scholars.

F’s study can be understood as having two principal research questions. The first, which informs the title of the volume, is: When Brodsky writes innovative Russian verse, can the deviations be understood as being associated specifically with the English verse tradition? The second, which intersects in some ways with the first, is: Should Brodsky’s innovative rhythms be regarded as rule-making or rule-breaking? F’s answers to these questions are formal and statistical claims (or they at least can properly and profitably be understood as such), and for that reason they are amenable to exploration and testing specifically through formal mechanisms of the sort employed in generative poetics and the statistical corpus-based modeling pioneered in the Russian quantitative tradition.

F identifies regularities in the rhythm of English and Russian verse, with the goal of determining whether Brodsky’s deviations from the rules and conventions of Russian meter and rhythm are specifically ‘English’. The canonical metrical systems of Russian and English are fundamentally the same: both are (or, at least, are often) syllabotonic in orientation, with a preference for binary and ternary meters, so that it is meaningful in both traditions to speak of, for example, iambic tetrameter. Using the term stressed to refer to a linguistically stressed syllable and strong to a syllable where stress is anticipated according to the ambient meter of the poem, either long words or sequences of stressed monosyllables can produce discrepancies between the meter of a poem and the distribution of actual stresses in a specific line. This situation is exacerbated in Russian because Russian has more long words than English and, except in the case of compound words, does not permit secondary stress.

Poetry would be tedious if the distribution of stress in every line corresponded exactly to the idealized underlying strong ~ weak metrical structure, and both English and Russian verse allow certain types of deviations as variation, rather than violation. As F, citing Roman Jakobson, puts it, one may examine poetic practice ‘in terms of rhythmical constants, i.e., conditions that poets do not violate, and rhythmical tendencies, i.e., statistical frequencies’ (4). F describes systematically the English and Russian norms, only some of which are common to the two poetic traditions, which means that Brodsky’s deviation from a Russian norm might or might not constitute deviation from the corresponding English norm. For example, the English and Russian monosyllable rules (12) are not identical, but they hold in common a provision that a stressed monosyllabic word may occur in weak position, which means that such practice in Brodsky’s poetry, while representing a local deviation from the ambient meter of the poem, could not constitute evidence specifically of a ‘foreign’ or ‘English’ rhythm.

Much of the...