Joseph Never Set Foot in This House:
the plaque, “Fondamenta degli Incurabili” and “Watermark”
How many times do I read about and see people taking pictures of the white marble plaque dedicated to the memory of Joseph Brodsky on the garden wall of a house on the Zattere? I knew the owners and had been to the house often. My friend Joseph never set foot there.
The plaque is simply in the wrong place.
Joseph was referring to the adjacent fondamenta (one bridge away toward Punta della Dogana) where the former hospital, now the Accademia di Belle Arti, is located, not the fondamenta Zattere agli Incurabili (formerly Fondamenta agli Incurabili alla Santa Maria del Rosario o Gesuati). Joseph was never in the house behind the wall where the plaque is and did not know the owners.
The plaque was placed there on May 21st, 2009, by Massimo Cacciari, then mayor of Venice and anything but a fan of Joseph’s, who once characterized “Fondamenta degli Incurabili” as a postcard view of Venice, and Madame Medvedev, wife of the Russian president, as a public relations initiative to promote a “special cultural mission” between St. Petersburg and Venice. Mrs.Brodsky was never consulted. The idea originated in Moscow as part of an ongoing campaign to reclaim the exiled poet and his memory.
The plaque reads in Italian: Grande poeta russo, premio Nobel, amó e cantó questo luogo (Great Russian poet, Nobel Laureate, loved and sang of this place). There is no mention of the fact that the book was written in English by a naturalized American who was not permitted to return to Russia even for his parents’ funerals, nor was it published in Russian during his lifetime. It was a purely Soviet propaganda show. There was an exhibition of photographs and a gala party in the evening at the Venice Casino.
I received the invitation and did not reply. When, the next morning “Il Gazzettino” reported my presence, I wrote the following letter to the editor which was printed a few days later:
I Wasn’t at the Casino that Evening.
Permit me to correct an error reported in the Gazzettino last May 22nd. I was not present at Madame Medvedev’s Casino gala on May 21st, 2009. To repeat: I was not there. Out of respect for my late friend, who dedicated “Fondamenta degli Incurabili” to me, I could not have participated in a politically orchestrated and historically contradictory farce so alien to Joseph’s legacy. A cardboard circus that had nothing to do with his family and dear friends could not have been more contrary to the true Russian spirit of Joseph Brodsky.
Robert Morgan, Venice
The book was commissioned and published out of commerce in 1989 in Venice by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova as a Christmas gift to its clients. “Fondamenta degli Incurabili” became the first volume in a yearly series by distinguished authors celebrating Venice. It was written in English and translated into Italian by Gilberto Forti. Joseph was offered a brief stay (ten days, two weeks?) in the Hotel Monaco and a modest compensation. The room was small, not a suite on the Grand Canal. He wrote with a borrowed typewriter. It was in November.
Joseph and I proofread the manuscript during his stay in Venice as the guest of the Consorzio. Upon departure Joseph gave me a nearly complete text in the form of a scroll. He had had the pages photocopied in a way that they became a single strip of paper approx. 20 ft. long. I suggested the title which appealed to Joseph because it connoted his fatalistic feelings concerning his own health (i.e., cardiac condition). Rio Terà dei Assassini was another candidate. He dedicated the book to me in appreciation of my assistance. The scroll is in my possession to this day.
I’m a painter. In 1986, three years before “Fondamenta” and a year before the Nobel Prize, I painted a portrait of Joseph in my studio/apartment on the Zattere in Venice, which may be the only one done from life. Joseph bought it from me and presented it as a gift to his friend and French translator Veronique Schiltz. The portrait and photographs do not resemble the Soviet artist’s profile of Joseph on the plaque.
The Zattere is a long embankment on the Canale della Giudecca and Fondamenta agli Incurabili is part of it.
My apartment was a stone’s throw away, on the fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati, to be precise. Joseph was a frequent visitor and spent hours making notes and watching the ships go by while sitting on the terrace of the Bar Gelateria Nico as he sipped espresso, smoked cigarettes from which he stripped the filters, and threw back a grappa or two. Nico is directly below where I used to live and work. Joseph never stayed at the neighboring Pensione Calcina or Seguso as far as I recall. We often ate together at my house and he occasionally napped on my sofa.
Watermark – as a title, came later when the book was commercially published in English in 1992. It was the publisher’s choice.
Joseph was pleased by the technical precision and metaphorical potential of the word. A watermark is a filigrana, a sort of indelible birthmark. It results from the paper making process. It’s an integral part of the very fabric of the paper and it is best visible against the light.
The title, however, varies in different languages. For instance, in French it is “Acqua alta”, in Swedish “Vattenspegel” (lit. water level), in German: “Ufer der Verlorenen” (Embankment of the Forlorn), while in Polish and Spanish it’s “Znak wodny” and “Marca de agua” (Watermark), in Hungarian: “Velence vízjele” (Venetian watermark) and in Russian it is Fondamenta degli Incurabili translated literally into Russian.
Incidentally, the English edition contains an additional chapter which clearly explains Joseph’s notion about the site, very close to Olga Rudge’s house as described in the book, and its function. Topographically, the writer is on the Fondamenta Zattere allo Spirito Santo - the place customarily referred to by Venetians as Incurabili - and he creates a literary topos of Fondamenta degli Incurabili, the address for which the pilgrims search in vain. The chapter doesn’t appear in the Italian edition by Adelphi (1991 and following editions) based on the manuscript and the Consorzio edition. To my knowledge, it is included in most foreign editions subsequent to the publication of “Watermark” by FSG in the US and Hamish Hamilton in the UK (1992). It begins with the exclamation:
“Ah, the good old suggestive power of language!”
and ends as follows:
“A metaphor – or, to put it more broadly, language itself – is by and large open-ended, it craves continuum: an afterlife, if you will. In other words (no pun intended) metaphor is incurable. Add then to all of this yourself, a carrier of this metiér, or of this virus (...) shuffling on a windy ćnight along the Fondamenta, whose name proclaims your diagnosis regardless of the nature of your malady.”
©Robert Morgan, Venice, April/May 2022