Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky föddes i Leningrad 1940 och avled 1996 i New York. Han mottog Nobelpriset i litteratur 1987 med motiveringen: »för ett vittfamnande författarskap, präglat av tankeskärpa och poetisk intensitet«. Dikter är en nyutgåva av Brodskys poesi i urval av hans vän och översättare Bengt Jangfeldt. Dikterna spänner över en trettio­årsperiod och fångar därmed mångfalden i hans skapande. År 1972 förvisades Brodsky från Sovjetunionen på grund av sitt diktskrivande, trots att hans tematik inte är politisk. Därefter levde han i USA, där han fortsatte att verka som poet. Brodsky är en av de få verkligt stora poeter som var födda och uppvuxna i Sovjetunionen och hans författarskap fortsätter att fascinera. Översättningar av: Werner & Anna Asp­enström, Julian Birbrajer, Hans Björkegren, Annika Bäckström och Bengt Jangfeldt, som också står för urval och efterord.

'Brodsky charged at the world . . . there is no voice, no vision, remotely like it' The New York Times Book ReviewSelf-educated, intense, impulsive and unmoored, Joseph Brodsky emerged in mid-century Russia as a poetic virtuoso, recognized by such greats as Anna Akhmatova as their worthy heir. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, the poems in this volume unfold the project that, as Brodsky saw it, the condition of exile presented: 'to set the next man - however theoretical he and his needs may be - a bit more free.'This edition includes poems translated by Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and poems written in English or translated by the author himself. It surveys Brodsky's tumultuous life and illustrious career, and showcases his most notable and poignant work as a poet.Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Edited and introduced by Ann Kjellberg

Joseph Brodsky spent his life advocating for the place of the poet in society. As Derek Walcott said of him, "Joseph was somebody who lived poetry . . . He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling." The poems in this volume span Brodsky's career, which was marked by his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, they represent the project that, as Brodsky said, the "condition we call exile" presented: "to set the next man--however theoretical he and his needs may be--a bit more free." This edition, edited and introduced by Brodsky's literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, includes poems translated by Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht, as well as poems written in English or translated by the author himself. Selected Poems, 1968-1996 surveys Brodsky's tumultuous life and illustrious career and showcases his most notable and poignant work as a poet.

The collection of critical and autobiographical essays from Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky that catapulted the author--heretofore known more for his poetry and translations--into the forefront of the "Third Wave" of Russian migr writers. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. Less Than One, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

On Grief and Reason collects the essays that Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes Brodsky's Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni; his "Immodest Proposal" for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost; his searching estimations of Hardy, Horace, and Rilke; an affecting memoir of Stephen Spender; and a moving meditation on the figure of Marcus Aureilus. The essays, composed in Brodsky's distinctive, idiomatic English, are inventive and alive. The Nobel laureate, himself branded a "pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" by Soviet authorities and expelled from his home country in 1972, writes boldly of the poet's place in society: "By failing to read or listen to poets, a society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation--of the politician, or the salesman, or the charlatan--in short, to its own. It forfeits . . . its own evolutionary potential . . ." This edition, reissued on the occasion of the late author's eightieth birthday, prompts the reader to consider Brodsky's words with renewed contemplation of the current state of literature and the society in which we read it.

In this brief, intense, gemlike book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Joseph Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of forty-eight short chapters--each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly twenty years)--Watermark associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. Brodsky writes in Watermark that water "stores our reflections for when we are long gone." This reissued edition of one of Brodsky's most important titles, on the occasion of the late Nobel laureate's eightieth birthday, allows the reader to visit the canals of Brodsky's Venice and rediscover the reflection of the writer himself.

Vattenspegel publicerades 1992 i o?versa?ttning av Bengt Jang­feldt med underrubriken »En bok om Venedig«. O?versa?tt­ningen gjordes fra?n ett manuskript som tillhandaho?lls av Brodskys amerikanska fo?r­lag. Da?refter gjorde Brodsky ett flertal fo?ra?ndringar i tex­ten ? bland annat lade han till ett nytt kapitel ? varfo?r den amerikanska utga?van, som ut­ kom efter den svenska, pa? flera punkter skiljer sig fra?n denna. Ha?r fo?religger fo?r fo?rsta ga?n­gen en reviderad och fullsta?ndig svensk o?versa?ttning av Vattenspegel av Bengt Jang­feldt, som dessutom skrivit ett efterord. Den ryskfo?dde poeten Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) mot­ tog Nobelpriset i litteratur a?r 1987 med motiveringen: »fo?r ett vittfamnande fo?rfattar­ skap, pra?glat av tankeska?rpa och poetisk intensitet«.

'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street JournalWatermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

'Genius ... bringing ardent intelligence to bear upon poetry, politics and autobiography' Seamus HeaneyEssayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam. These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of his childhood in Leningrad. Brodsky's insightful appreciation of the intricacies of language, culture and identity connect these works, revealing his remarkable gifts as a prose writer.'Sparkles with intellect, and combines the precision of scholarship with the passion of the poet' The TimesWinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America. With dazzling erudition, he explores subjects as varied as the dynamic of poetry, the nature of history and the plight of the émigré writer. There is also the humorous tale of a disastrous trip to Brazil, advice to students, a homage to Marcus Aurelius and studies of Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Horace and others. The second volume of essays following Less Than One, this collection includes Brodsky's 1987 Nobel Lecture, 'Uncommon Visage'.

Die umfangreichste Auswahl von Gedichten des russischen Nobelpreisträgers in deutscher Sprache. Joseph Brodsky war ein Dichter vielfältiger Masken und Metamorphosen, ein russischer Odysseus und vom Tod besessener Ironiker, ein Liebeselegiker, Exilant und Erforscher der Zeit, ein eingefleischter Skeptiker und energischer Verteidiger von Wert und Würde der Poesie. Mit diesem vorbildlich übersetzten Durchgang durch sein Werk erschließt sich erstmals der phänomenale Facettenreichtum des unvergessenen Lyrikers.

Sankt Petersburg, die Stadt am Meer, wird in diesem Buch so lebendig und anschaulich gefeiert wie selten zuvor. Eine Liebeserklärung des Nobelpreisträgers Brodsky und eine Reise in die Erinnerung und in die Kindheit - geschrieben, um im Exil nicht zu verstummen. Mit Fotografien von Barbara Klemm, die Architektur, Menschen und Leben dieser großartigen Stadt dokumentieren.

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam out of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the teamof Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.--from "Star of the Nativity" Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention. In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

One of the greatest and the grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months of internal exile at hard labor, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this will be the essential volume of Brodsky's work.

Edited by Ann Kjellberg; translated by Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and others Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this Collected Poems in English for the first time collects all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. Both his own efforts to translate his work, and the poems he wrote directly in English, are ambitious: the poetic 'conceit' is for him functional as it was in the seventeenth century, a tool for prizing open difficult truths, making vertiginous connections. In the preface to A Part of Speech (Oxford, 1977) he wrote, 'I have taken the liberty of reworking some of the translations to bring them closer to the original, though perhaps at the expense of their smoothness.' Something strange and suggestive is alive in his disrupted prosodies, the pressure of content and of a poet making sense. Susan Sontag speaks of the poems' 'extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry's "job" (a much used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is 'accelerated thinking.'

Evgeny Rein is one of Russia's major living poets. Born in 1935, he belongs to that tragic generation of Russian poets who for decades went unpublished in the Soviet Union. One of Akhmatova's 'magic choir' of young Leningrad poets, he was Joseph Brodsky's mentor and lifetime friend. Brodsky figures in many of his poems, and Brodsky's essay on Rein introduces this bilingual selection: 'Rein is unquestionably an elegiac poet. His main theme is the end of things, the end, to put it more broadly, of a world order that is dear – or at least acceptable – to him. The incarnation of this order in his poetry is the city in which he grew up, the city of Leningrad… But in contrast to the dramatic effect usually found in elegiac poets… the death of the world order in Rein is accompanied by a vulgar ditty from the 30s or 40s. Indeed, for Rein’s work – and in my view he is the most gifted Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century – the cadences of Soviet popular music from that era probably had a greater influence than the technical achievements of the best among the Russian futurists and constructivists… Rein not only radically extended the poetic vocabulary and sound palette of Russian poetry; he also broadened and shook up the psychological sweep of Russian lyrics. He is an elegist, but of a tragic stripe. Few among his compatriots would dispute the depth of the despair and exhaustion that darkens these poems… ' Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. .

?Brodskys poetisches Genie explodiert?, schrieb die Zeit als Ufer der Verlorenen vor zehn Jahren erschien. Zusammen mit den großformatigen Photographien von Peter-Andreas Hassiepen, die das ganz alltägliche Venedig zeigen, ist ein Buch für Brodsky-Liebhaber, Venedig-Reisende und alle, die die Stadt noch entdecken wollen, entstanden.

Joseph Brodsky's last volume of poems in English, So Forth, represents eight years of masterful self-translation from the Russian, as well as a substantial body of work written directly in English. "Nobel laureate Brodsky completed work on this sobering and brilliant collection just a week before his death ...." Brodsky's death is a loss to literature; his final collection of poems is the best consolation we could ask for." - Publishers Weekly

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