Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and honored with the Nobel Prize fifteen years later, poet Joseph Brodsky in many ways fit the grand tradition of exiled writer. But Brodsky’s years of exile did not render him immobile: though he never returned to his beloved Leningrad, he was free to travel the world and write about it. In Brodsky Abroad, Sanna Turoma discusses Brodsky’s poems and essays about Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Challenging traditional conceptions behind Brodsky’s status as a leading émigré poet and major descendant of Russian and Euro-American modernism, she relocates the analysis of his travel texts in the diverse context of contemporary travel and its critique. Turoma views Brodsky’s travel writing as a response not only to his exile but also to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape that initially shaped the writing of these texts.

    In his Latin American encounters, Brodsky exhibits disdain for third-world politics and invokes the elegiac genre to reject Mexico’s postcolonial reality and to ironically embrace the romanticism of an earlier Russian and European imperial age. In an essay on Istanbul he assumes Russia’s ambiguous position between East and West as his own to negotiate a distinct, and controversial, interpretation of Orientalism. And, Venice, the emblematic tourist city, becomes the site for a reinvention of his lyric self as more fluid, hybrid, and cosmopolitan.

    Brodsky Abroad reveals the poet’s previously uncharted trajectory from alienated dissident to celebrated man of letters and offers new perspectives on the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination.

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.

Peter Viereck’s career in poetry is an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. In Tide and Continuities that experiment has yielded its finest results. Included are many new poems, never before published, and stunning revisions from work as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Terror and Decorum.

This collection is the revelation of a great American poet. The Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky calls Viereck “possibly the greatest rhymer of / the modern period.” This is Viereck’s most lyrical, most passionate book; hence Brodsky rhymes “lyric” with “Viereck.”

Tide and Continuities marks Viereck’s complete evolution as a poet, and brilliantly describes the arc of more than a half century’s work.