Notes on the Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots

Abstract

‘Non angli, sed angeli’, said a punning Pope centuries ago. Brodsky begins his sonnet sequence with an equally bad, but less complimentary pun: ‘skoty’/Scots. The first line sets a tone — flippant, conversational, vulgar. As for the pun, the significant thing is surely the distance it establishes. The English language (Brodsky’s adopted language) is heard with Russian ears, which detect new resonances in it, much as those often extraterritorial writers Beckett and Nabokov find a new strangeness in their imposed or self-imposed second languages. In this sequence, written in 1974 some two years after Brodsky left for America, a feeling of distance is always present, openly or covertly: distance between words and feelings, between past and present, between individual and society, between the poet and his native land. The separation of exile is regularly likened to the execution of the queen.