Authors

Andrew Reynolds¹;  ¹ University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Discussion

 Joseph Brodsky understood that he gained much of his own poetic authority from the Russian literary tradition of the kenotic poet-martyr, and his poems reveal his doubts as to whether one can preserve the power of the Russian bard if one follows Auden and renounces, Prospero-like, elements of one's art. If the "interpenetration of the Russian and Anglo-American poetic traditions" is indeed "Brodsky's special signature as a poet" (Bethea), then why does Brodsky seem more essentially Russian and lose more in translation than his great predecessors? Are Brodsky's self-translations quixotic attempts to translate the Russian model, in which poetic word and human deed are one, into a Western context?