Iosif Brodskij o Joseph Brodsky

Adam Kirsch scrive un bel ritratto di Iosif Brodskij (anglicizzato in Joseph Brodsky) in cui affronta varie questioni: il fatto che le sue poesie non si traducano bene in inglese (molte le ha tradotte il poeta stesso) e che di conseguenza la sua fama in America non sia del tutto solida (Yet few English readers have been really satisfied with Brodsky’s own translations. His desire to make them is understandable—by turning himself into an American poet, after a fashion, he was saved from the obscurity and resentment that is the usual lot of the literary émigré. But he never became a master of English, in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov did); le sue origini ebraiche e il suo cosmopolitismo (But his essential identity, as he created it in his poems and essays, was universalist and cosmopolitan. Its key ingredients were the Russian language, European art and literature, and classical history); e alcuni punti della sua biografia, presi da un nuovo libro uscito presso Yale UP, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, di Lev Loseff, tradotto in inglese da Jane Ann Miller. Tablet.