Joseph Brodsky – författare

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.

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.

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.

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 émigré 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.