Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation [Paperback]

Is poetry lost in translation, or is it perhaps the other way around? Is it found? Gained? Won?
What happens when a poet decides to give his favorite Russian poems a new life in English? Are the new texts shadows, twins or doppelgangers of their originals-or are they something completely different? Does the poet resurrect himself from the death of the author by reinterpreting his own work in another language, or does he turn into a monster: a bilingual, bicultural centaur?
Alexandra Berlina, herself a poetry translator and a 2012 Barnstone Translation Prize laureate, addresses these questions in this new study of Joseph Brodsky, whose Nobel-prize-winning work has never yet been discussed from this perspective.

Alexandra Berlinais Postdoctoral Researcher in Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Her translations of Brodsky's poems Dido and Aeneas and You can't tell a gnat... have won awards from the 'Willis Barnstone Translation Prize' and the 'The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize'.

Robert Chandleris an award-winning poet and translator from Russian, French, and Greek. Among the writers he has translated from Russian are Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He is the co-editor of the Penguin Classics anthologyRussian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky(2014). Penguin have also published his anthologies of Russian short stories and of Russian magic tales.

Written in a lively style and replete with astute observations and provocative insights, Berlinas book is a joy to read. It is highly recommended. -Adrian Wanner, The Pennsylvania State University, USA,Comparative Literature Studies

What Brodsky inherited from the Russian tradition was a belief in poetry as a sacrament; what he inherited from the Anglo-American tradition was an enjoyment of poetry as a space for the free play of the intellect. No one has written as clearly and comprehensively asl“¡