Synopses & Reviews
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.
About the Author
Alexandra Berlina is Assistant Professor for American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, 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 Chandler is 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 anthology Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (2014). Penguin have also published his anthologies of Russian short stories and of Russian magic tales.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text
Foreword: Post-Modernist Chants, Robert Chandler
1. What Is It All About?
2. “December in Florence”
3. Three Nativity Poems
4. Poems à Clef: M.B.s Birthday
5. Elegies
6. Beyond Translation: “Centaurs” and Other Hybrids
7. Further Beyond Translation: “Sextet” and Other Excavations
8. Themes Taking Root in Translation and Other Tendencies
Bibliography
Index