Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)
Author of Watermark
About the Author
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time he taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. His first poems appeared mainly in Syntax, show more a Leningrad underground literary magazine. In 1964, he was tried and sentenced to five years of administrative exile for the charge of parasitism. As a result of intervention by prominent Soviet cultural figures, he was freed in 1965. In 1972, under tremendous pressure from the authorities, he emigrated to the United States. He wrote nine volumes of poetry and several collections of essays. His works include A Part of Speech, To Urania, Watermark, On Grief and Reason, So Forth, and Collected Poems in English. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was named poet laureate of the United States, the first poet whose native language was not English to achieve this honor. He died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Joseph Brodsky
No vendra el diluvio tras nosotros/ The Problem Will Not Come From Us (Spanish Edition) (2000) 9 copies
POEZIJA 8 copies
Mniej niż ktoś 2 copies
V ozhidanii varvarov: Mirovaia poeziia v perevodakh Iosifa Brodskogo (Russian Edition) (2001) 2 copies
Избранное 2 copies
Остановка в пустыне 2 copies
Константин Рудаков. Графика 1 copy
Стихотворения и поэмы, т. 2 1 copy
Стихотворения и поэмы, т. 1 1 copy
Сочинения, том 1 1 copy
Холмы 1 copy
Книга интервью 1 copy
Сочинения. Стихотворения 1 copy
Подклониться тени 1 copy
Zamieć w Massachusetts 1 copy
私人―ノーベル賞受賞講演 1 copy
I Brodsky Rechi izbrannye poems podar oforml Brodskiy I Chast rechi Izbrannye stikhotvoreniya podar (2010) 1 copy
82 wiersze i poematy 1 copy
Posvećeno kičmi 1 copy
Tuga i razum 1 copy
Římské elegie 1 copy
Putevoditel po pereimenovannomu gorodu = A Guide to a Renamed City: izbrannye esse na rus., angl.yaz (2022) 1 copy
W półtora pokoju 1 copy
Stichotvorenija i poemy 1 copy
Путешествие в Стамбул 1 copy
Υπερασπίζοντας τον Καβάφη 1 copy
Marca de Água 1 copy
Посвящается Ялте 1 copy
PAJ #54 1 copy
Стихотворения 1 copy
Сочинения Иосифа Бродского 1 copy
Осенний крик ястреба 1 copy
Associated Works
A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (1996) — Contributor — 943 copies, 12 reviews
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998) — Contributor — 499 copies, 2 reviews
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) — Contributor — 377 copies, 2 reviews
The Company They Kept, Volume Two: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships (2011) — Contributor — 25 copies
De mooiste verhalen van James Baldwin, John Berger, Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Bowles, Joseph Brodsky, Charles Bukowski, Wi (1990) — Contributor — 6 copies
Fotspår : noveller ur Sveriges radio P1:s serie Författarskap på fötter (2003) — Contributor — 5 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Brodsky, Joseph
- Legal name
- Brodsky, Iosif Aleksandrovich
- Other names
- Бродский, Иосиф Александрович
- Birthdate
- 1940-05-24
- Date of death
- 1996-01-28
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- poet
hospital orderly
professor
essayist - Organizations
- Mount Holyoke College
- Awards and honors
- Nobel Prize (Literature ∙ 1987)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 1979)
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1991-1992)
MacArthur Fellowship (1981)
Honorary Doctorate (Letters, Yale University, 1978)
National Book Critics Award for Criticism (1986) - Relationships
- Akhmatova, Anna (friend)
- Short biography
- From Poets.org: Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad and left school at the age of 15, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time, he taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad." He moved to the USA, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973. Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught for 15 years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American culture.
Joseph Brodsky was also a Russian nationalist with a loathing of Ukrainian independence. His On Ukrainian Independence (1992, unpublished) includes the lines 'Hurry back to your huts to be gang-banged by Krauts and Pollacks right in the guts' and 'When it's your turn to be dragged to graveyards, / You'll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing, / Not Shevchenko's bullshit but poetry from Pushkin'. (Alexander Pushkin and Taras Shevchenko, foundational poets of Russia and Ukraine respectively). - Cause of death
- heart attack
- Nationality
- Russia (birth)
USA - Birthplace
- Leningrad, Russia, USSR
- Places of residence
- Leningrad, Russia
Arkhangelsk, Russia
New York, New York, USA
Venice, Italy - Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Burial location
- Cimitero di San Michele, Venice, Italy
Members
Reviews
This was Brodsky's last poetry collection, published shortly after his death in 1996, and it contains poems written from about 1989 onwards, some in English and some in Russian (most of the Russian poems appear here in his own English translation, a few were translated by others). The themes are often quite dark, dealing with topics like war, exile and old age — although he was only in his fifties, he had been in poor health for a long time and seems to have known death was just round the show more corner. But there are also several of his famous nativity poems, a couple of longer poems on subjects from classical mythology, and some of the love poems and satires in the collection turn out to be surprisingly bouncy.
Brodsky obviously shared with his friend Auden a fondness for using jokey language about serious subjects, and it's wonderful to see the panache with which he misuses the English language to good effect. It's difficult to imagine a poet who was a native English speaker having the nerve to rhyme "Senegal" with "chemical" and "sketch pad" with "stupid" in the same quatrain, but Brodsky does so (and worse, far, far, worse...) and gets away with it every time.
He also loves clouds, and they lead to some of his most extravagant images: they "are scattered, like a bachelor's clothes" in one poem, or rear up their "huge lid like a Steinway" in another; in yet another "Clouds of patently absurd / But endearing shapes assert / The resemblance of their lot / To a cumulative thought," and in addition to all that there's a whole, very wonderful, poem about the summer clouds of the Baltic that everyone ought to read.
Good stuff! show less
Brodsky obviously shared with his friend Auden a fondness for using jokey language about serious subjects, and it's wonderful to see the panache with which he misuses the English language to good effect. It's difficult to imagine a poet who was a native English speaker having the nerve to rhyme "Senegal" with "chemical" and "sketch pad" with "stupid" in the same quatrain, but Brodsky does so (and worse, far, far, worse...) and gets away with it every time.
He also loves clouds, and they lead to some of his most extravagant images: they "are scattered, like a bachelor's clothes" in one poem, or rear up their "huge lid like a Steinway" in another; in yet another "Clouds of patently absurd / But endearing shapes assert / The resemblance of their lot / To a cumulative thought," and in addition to all that there's a whole, very wonderful, poem about the summer clouds of the Baltic that everyone ought to read.
Good stuff! show less
Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant.
Brodsky is at his best when speaking about the greats, Tsvetaeva, Mandestam, Auden, Frost. He drifts into crank-ness when speaking philosophically, which he is wont to do in these pages, about show more Tyranny, Civilization or Evil.
Throughout one’s life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca.
There is a great deal of longing here, for Petersburg, his parents, for a time when life was free from sweeping definitions of Guilt or Innocence. Yet the pull is too strong. Brodsky sees Evil looming, He asserts that poetry precedes prose, that empires are built on language. He champions Platonov and finds Auden the greatest mind of the 20C. He offers extremely close readings of poems, ones which both dazzle and confront. He is betrays periodically his surprise fortune and then just as deftly leaps form the guilt, if only he could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPmMFbCI_f0
Keep this in mind when pondering judgement. show less
Brodsky is at his best when speaking about the greats, Tsvetaeva, Mandestam, Auden, Frost. He drifts into crank-ness when speaking philosophically, which he is wont to do in these pages, about show more Tyranny, Civilization or Evil.
Throughout one’s life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca.
There is a great deal of longing here, for Petersburg, his parents, for a time when life was free from sweeping definitions of Guilt or Innocence. Yet the pull is too strong. Brodsky sees Evil looming, He asserts that poetry precedes prose, that empires are built on language. He champions Platonov and finds Auden the greatest mind of the 20C. He offers extremely close readings of poems, ones which both dazzle and confront. He is betrays periodically his surprise fortune and then just as deftly leaps form the guilt, if only he could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPmMFbCI_f0
Keep this in mind when pondering judgement. show less
Watermark is powerful prose poetry, sometimes flashing a vivid image before the reader’s inner eye, sometimes wrapping its pearls tightly inside almost haiku-like sentences. “One is what one looks at,” Brodsky says, and I am glad I looked at this.
"Many moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty-two."
Thus begins this really lovely meditation on Venice. Though it is occasionally marred by what I can only term "excessive use of language", a habit of Brodsky's of using multiple synonyms and esoteric words (perhaps because English is not his first language?), one easily puts that to one side.
Brodsky explains why everyone goes shopping when they come to Venice (like one needs an excuse!): "For this is the city of the eye; your show more other faculties play a faint second fiddle. The way the hues and rhythms of the local façades try to smooth the waves' ever-changing colors and patterns alone may send you to grab a fancy scarf, tie, or whatnot; it glues even an inveterate bachelor to a window flooded with its motley flaunted dresses, not to mention patent-leather shoes and suede boots scattered like all sorts of boats upon the laguna."
One of the chapters describes being shown a palazzo, going from a "long, poorly lit gallery with a convex ceiling swarming with putti", through a library with "fat, white, vellum-bound volumes . . . just enough for a gentleman; more would turn him into a penseur, with disastrous consequences either for his manners or for his estate" thence to an enfilade, room after empty room, with drapes brittle and threadbare, golden-framed mirrors, all powdered with dust and "unreasonably ghostly", until at last they reach the master bedroom. There looms a four-poster bed, sculptured with grotesque cherubs, and a portable TV in the corner.
For Brodsky, on his academic schedule, Venice is a city for winter, cold, wet, eerily beautiful, where "King Fog rode into the piazza, reined in his stalion, and started to unfurl his white turban".
If this book doesn't make you want to go to Venice, nothing will. show less
Thus begins this really lovely meditation on Venice. Though it is occasionally marred by what I can only term "excessive use of language", a habit of Brodsky's of using multiple synonyms and esoteric words (perhaps because English is not his first language?), one easily puts that to one side.
Brodsky explains why everyone goes shopping when they come to Venice (like one needs an excuse!): "For this is the city of the eye; your show more other faculties play a faint second fiddle. The way the hues and rhythms of the local façades try to smooth the waves' ever-changing colors and patterns alone may send you to grab a fancy scarf, tie, or whatnot; it glues even an inveterate bachelor to a window flooded with its motley flaunted dresses, not to mention patent-leather shoes and suede boots scattered like all sorts of boats upon the laguna."
One of the chapters describes being shown a palazzo, going from a "long, poorly lit gallery with a convex ceiling swarming with putti", through a library with "fat, white, vellum-bound volumes . . . just enough for a gentleman; more would turn him into a penseur, with disastrous consequences either for his manners or for his estate" thence to an enfilade, room after empty room, with drapes brittle and threadbare, golden-framed mirrors, all powdered with dust and "unreasonably ghostly", until at last they reach the master bedroom. There looms a four-poster bed, sculptured with grotesque cherubs, and a portable TV in the corner.
For Brodsky, on his academic schedule, Venice is a city for winter, cold, wet, eerily beautiful, where "King Fog rode into the piazza, reined in his stalion, and started to unfurl his white turban".
If this book doesn't make you want to go to Venice, nothing will. show less
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