Poetry
A Part of Speech
Часть речи
Joseph Brodsky · 1977
Synopsis
Poems written in Russian between 1972 and 1976, most of them after their author's departure. One poem turns towards the native North, others speak of exile as a distancing from the mother tongue. Ulysses writes to Telemachus that he no longer knows where he is, nor who won the war, nor his son's age. A traveller who has arrived in the Empire takes his place among the statues; the head falls, only a torso remains. The sequence that gives the volume its title holds that what remains of a man is a part of speech.
Context
The volume appeared in 1977 from Ardis, in Ann Arbor, a house founded by Carl and Ellendea Proffer to publish the authors whom the Soviet Union banned. The English version, published three years later in New York under the same title, is not a translation of it: it brings together poems from 1965 to 1978, translated by eleven hands and revised by the author to recover the character of the originals. Brodsky's poems were not published in the Soviet Union until December 1987.
Who it is for
Poems of varying length, with a crafted syntax and rich rhymes that translations render poorly. Two volumes bear this title and differ widely. Not translated in full into French.
Prizes and reception
A collection from the mature years of an author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ten years later, in 1987.
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