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Collected Poems In English

Joseph Brodsky

Edited by Ann Kjellberg

Translated by Anthony Hecht

Cover Picture of Collected Poems In English
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Categories: 20th Century, Russian, Translation
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (542 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2001)
9781903039557
£30.00 £27.00
  • Description
  • Author
  • Edited by Ann Kjellberg; translated by Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and others

    Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this Collected Poems in English for the first time collects all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. Both his own efforts to translate his work, and the poems he wrote directly in English, are ambitious: the poetic 'conceit' is for him functional as it was in the seventeenth century, a tool for prizing open difficult truths, making vertiginous connections. In the preface to A Part of Speech (Oxford, 1977) he wrote, 'I have taken the liberty of reworking some of the translations to bring them closer to the original, though perhaps at the expense of their smoothness.' Something strange and suggestive is alive in his disrupted prosodies, the pressure of content and of a poet making sense.

    Susan Sontag speaks of the poems' 'extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry's "job" (a much used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is 'accelerated thinking.'
    Joseph Brodsky
    Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1940 into a Russian-Jewish family. He left school when he was fifteen and began writing poetry three years later. He lived a year (1964-5) in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. In June 1972 he became an involuntary exile and ... read more
    Anthony Hecht
    Anthony Hecht was born in New York City in 1923. He was educated at Columbia University and is married with three children. He has published eight volumes of poetry, of which the latest is The Darkness and the Light . He is also the author of three volumes of essays and ... read more
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