Joseph Brodsky

Poet, translator, essayist, and playwright Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky was reviled and persecuted by officials in his native Soviet Union while the Western literary establishment lauded him as one of the finest poets working in the Russian language. From the time he began publishing poetry, both under his own name and under the anglicized name Joseph Brodsky, he aroused the ire of Soviet authorities, which was compounded by the anti-Semitic persecution he faced because of his Jewish ancestry. 

Brodsky was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union, now Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian Jewish family. His father was a photographer for the Soviet Navy and eventually lost his position because he was Jewish; the family subsequently lived in poverty. Brodsky quit school at 15 and embarked on a self-directed education, reading literary classics and taking a variety of unusual jobs, including assisting a coroner and working asa geologist’s assistant in Central Asia. He learned English and Polish so he could translate the poems ofJohn Donne andCzeslaw Milosz.

Brodsky’s poetry, completely banned in his home country for most of his life, bears the marks of his confrontations with the Russian authorities. “Brodsky is someone who has tasted extremely bitter bread,” wroteStephen Spender in the New Statesman, “and his poetry has the air of being ground out between his teeth. … It should not be supposed that he is a liberal or even a socialist. He deals in unpleasing, hostile truths and is a realist of the least comforting and comfortable kind.” According to a Time magazine review, the poet’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was “the culmination of an inexplicable secret-police vendetta against him that has been going on for over a decade.” Brodsky said, “They have simply kicked me out of my country, using the Jewish issue as an excuse.” 

The vendetta against Brodsky first came to a head in a Leningrad trial in 1964 because of which he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. Protests from artists and writers led byAnna Akhmatova shortly before her death helped secure his release after 18 months, but his poetry was still banned. Israel invited him to immigrate, and the government encouraged him to go. Brodsky refused, explaining that he did not identify with the Jewish state.

He was eventually forced to leave the Soviet Union and in 1972 moved to Michigan, where, with the help of the poetW.H. Auden, he settled in at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as poet-in-residence. Brodsky then taught at several universities, including Queens College in New York City and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He continued to write poetry, often writing in Russian and translating his work into English. 

Over the course of his life, Brodsky published more than two dozen books in Russian and more than a dozen books in English. His essay collection Less Than One: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986) won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Brodsky went on to win the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991.

Though many critics agreed that Brodsky was one of the finest contemporary Russian poets, some felt that the English translations were less impressive. Commenting on George L. Kline’s translation of Selected Poems, Joseph Brodsky (Harper, 1973), Stephen Spender wrote, “These poems are impressive in English, though one is left having to imagine the technical virtuosity of brilliant rhyming in the originals. … One is never quite allowed to forget that one is reading a second-hand version.” Selected Poems was Brodsky’s first book to appear in the United States, and Kline went on to translate more of Brodsky’s poetry than any other single person with the exception of the poet himself.

Other translators of Brodsky’s work include Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Brodsky himself. In A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980),Brodsky gathered the work of several translators and made amendments to some of the poems in an attempt to restore the character of the originals. In the essay “Faith and Good Works: Joseph Brodsky and His Translators,” which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephanie Sandler wrote that, later on in Brodsky’s career, different translators often produced individual translations of the same poem and Brodsky mixed and matched these translations and added his own alterations.

Exile was always difficult for Brodsky. In one poem, he described an exiled writer as one “who survives like a fish in the sand.” Despite these feelings, he was largely unmoved by the sweeping political changes that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union. He told David Remnick, then of TheWashington Post, that those changes were “devoid of autobiographical interest” for him and that his allegiance was to his language. In the Detroit Free Press, Bob McKelvey cited this declaration from a letter by Brodsky: “I belong to the Russian culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language.”

Because of his strong allegiance to the Russian language, Brodksy has been criticized as a nationalist. However, his relationship to Russia and the Soviet Union was complicated. Keith Gessen wrote in a New Yorker article:

The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is of course paradoxical, and worth considering … like so many of the developments in the post-Soviet space, it was complicated. Brodsky was a strongly anti-Soviet Soviet poet, but a Soviet poet nonetheless.

His work demonstrates prejudices against former Soviet nations, including Ukraine. One of his unpublished poems in particular was used to promote the Russian state's oppression of neighboring nations more than a decade after his death. In the same New Yorker article, Brodsky’s literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, is quoted:

A poem known only from private manuscripts and other unauthorized sources should perhaps not be taken as representing an author’s settled views. Dating and historical circumstances might also be borne in mind when considering an archival source. In the summer of 1992, for example, newly independent Ukraine declared administrative control over former Soviet nuclear capability on its territory, including 176 ICBMs. Perhaps somewhat inflaming circumstances, later reconsidered.

Shortly before his death in 1996, Brodsky completed So Forth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), a collection of poems he wrote in English or translated from his own poetry written in Russian. So Forth was judged inferior to Brodsky’s best work by several critics, including Michael Glover, who described the collection in the New Statesman as “more failure than success.” Glover felt that Brodsky too often “lapses into a kind of swashbuckling slanginess, a kind of raw muscularity that, at its worst, reads like embarrassing doggerel.” Others found So Forth powerful, including the Publishers Weekly reviewer who called it “an astonishing collection from a writer able to mix the cerebral and the sensual, the political and the intimate, the elegiac and the comic. … Brodsky’s death is a loss to literature; his final collection of poems is the best consolation we could ask for.”

Collected Poems in English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), published posthumously and edited by Kjellberg, is a definitive collection of Brodsky’s translated work and his original work in English. Some of Kline’s translations are included in the collection, but the vast majority of the translations were by Brodsky himself, either alone or in collaboration with others. In Booklist, Donna Seamanwrote that it is “dramatic and ironic, melancholy and blissful” and that this volume “will stand as one of the twentieth century’s tours de force.” It captures Brodsky’s trademark sense of “stepping aside and peering in bewilderment” at life, according to Sven Birkerts in the New York Times Book Review. Birkerts concluded, “Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled his perceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked to hold. There is no voice, no vision, remotely like it.”