Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet

Not just another book on Brodsky, this is a journey into the art of literary translation. The author unpacks the delicate balance between ‘good poem’ and ‘good translation,’ tracing Brodsky’s drafts and bilingual evolution to reveal how he reshaped both Russian and Anglo-American literary traditions.

A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational poet derives paradoxically from an inward-looking stance that privileges “the trope of the room” and a practice of self-translation that is faithful to his own internal poetics rather than the poetic norms of the target tradition. The resulting bilingual poetics is one that, though not universally accepted by English readers, ultimately had a profound effect on the Anglo-American literary tradition and anticipated certain foreignizing tendencies that have become central to translation studies and theories of transnationalism. No less powerful than the book’s thesis is the elegant analyses, which encompass Brodsky’s Russian poetry, his translations from Russian to English, and his English-language essays.