Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Volume 1) offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. In comparison with the first edition of this volume published in 1992 this new second edition is enlarged with three new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees. The collection combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright, Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry.

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian. Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors? The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means.

This is an imaginative work of literary criticism. Thirteen scholars have selected a wide variety of Joseph Brodsky's poems written between 1970 and 1994 for detailed discussion in the context of his whole output. The choice of poems reflects Brodsky's diversity of themes and devices. Together they offer a perspective on one of the most original and profound modern poets. This collection should fulfil the often-expressed need for a comprehensive approach to the study of Brodsky's poetry, which is linguistically as well as intellectually demanding.

A deeply researched account of Joseph Brodsky’s evolution in English as a self-translator and a poet in translation Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own Russian-language poems into English “new originals” have been criticized for their “un-Englishness,” an appraisal based on a narrow understanding of translation itself. With this radical reassessment of the Nobel Prize winner’s self-translations, Zakhar Ishov proposes a fresh approach to poetry translation and challenges the assumption that poetic form is untranslatable. Brodsky in English draws on previously unexamined archival materials, including drafts and correspondence with translators and publishers, to trace the arc of Brodsky’s experience with the English language. Ishov shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States, including as Poet Laureate, anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation, locating the transmission of poetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself. This book highlights Brodsky’s place within the long history of the compromises translation must make between linguistic material and poetic process.

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

An intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry...highlights the paralles lives of the poets as exiles living in America and as Nobel Prize laureates in literature...Irena Grudzinska Gross draws on poems, essays, letter, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. -- pub. description.

This thoroughly researched overview on one of the most absorbing literary phenomena of recent decades—the trespassing of cultural and linguistic borders—departs from the canonical point of view offered by the English works of the Nobel laureate, Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, to approach the work of the emerging Hungarian-English poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Through the epistemological filter offered by some guiding texts (such as Bauman, Hall, Braidotti, and many others), this study allows the reader to discover the recounting of a search for an identity, where the adoption of English as an artistic vehicle is only the first thread that unites the two “nomadic” authors. Striving to “locate” language and identity, Brodsky and Lehóczky face the limits of doing so, due to the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself. This suggests, if not answers, then new ways of expression, which draw the language of our future.