Oct 9, 2026 · 1 hr · 13 segments
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that…
I really enjoyed reading your work and learning more about Joseph Brodsky, who is, of course, a character that many in the Jewish studies world know.
But for listeners who may, may be just a little bit less familiar with him and with his work, could you start by telling us a little bit more about who Brodsky was and why he matters so much?
So there are several ways actually in which I could, uh, introduce Joseph Brodsky.
Or I could say he's a poet laureate of the United States of nineteen ninety-one, nineteen ninety-two, which not so many people know, uh, about him, and maybe one of the least known maybe poet laureates, but also the only foreign-born poet laureate of the United States.
I could also say that he is a Nobel Prize winner for-- in literature for n- uh, nineteen eighty-seven, right? So there are so many ways in which he is a prominent figure.
He also had a very interested-- interesting biography, uh, in a sense that he was not actually formally educated in, uh, literature in any way, and he was-- he grew up in Leningrad.
He kind of raised himself as a poet, even though he, uh, was one of Akhmatova's orphans, the group of young poets that kind of circulated around Akhmatova in her old age and inherited s-some of the tradition from her, right? And then he was expelled from the Soviet Union, uh, and emigrated to America in nineteen seventy-two and created, like, a very, a very successful career as a professor of literature here, but also as a published essayist and poet as he translated himself and was-- his poetry was translated by prominent figures and famous poets, both British and American.
So he traveled very successful between-- successfully between these two countries and these two literary traditions, or even three or more, we might say.
I would say he repeated Nabokov's feat in many ways, although, I mean, there, there's a debate about it in the sch- in the scholarship.
But he is mostly famous for his biography, and this is what I think our scholarship is trying to fix here.
We are trying to focus more on how he was writing and what he was writing, um, how he translated himself and for what reason, rather than for, for the famous facts that he was tried for parasitism in the Soviet Union and was exiled to the north, um, and spent some years there.
And his case, his legal case became very famous worldwide, and even Sarter, uh, was writing to high Soviet officials asking for him, right? So for a long time, the focus was on his biography, and, uh, some people even ascribe his literary success to the fact that he was this famous pariah, right? Uh, or famous, um, exile.
And I think the, the scholarship today is actually digging deeper into the language itself and the poetic itself-- poetics itself.
And for me, it was important because his writing posits this age-old questions, what is a good poem? What is a good translation? In a very different angle than anything else that I encountered.
I really enjoyed reading your work and learning more about Joseph Brodsky, who is, of course, a character that many in the Jewish studies world know.
But for listeners who may, may be just a little bit less familiar with him and with his work, could you start by telling us a little bit more about who Brodsky was and why he matters so much?
So there are several ways actually in which I could, uh, introduce Joseph Brodsky.
Or I could say he's a poet laureate of the United States of nineteen ninety-one, nineteen ninety-two, which not so many people know, uh, about him, and maybe one of the least known maybe poet laureates, but also the only foreign-born poet laureate of the United States.
I could also say that he is a Nobel Prize winner for-- in literature for n- uh, nineteen eighty-seven, right? So there are so many ways in which he is a prominent figure.
He also had a very interested-- interesting biography, uh, in a sense that he was not actually formally educated in, uh, literature in any way, and he was-- he grew up in Leningrad.
He kind of raised himself as a poet, even though he, uh, was one of Akhmatova's orphans, the group of young poets that kind of circulated around Akhmatova in her old age and inherited s-some of the tradition from her, right? And then he was expelled from the Soviet Union, uh, and emigrated to America in nineteen seventy-two and created, like, a very, a very successful career as a professor of literature here, but also as a published essayist and poet as he translated himself and was-- his poetry was translated by prominent figures and famous poets, both British and American.
So he traveled very successful between-- successfully between these two countries and these two literary traditions, or even three or more, we might say.
I would say he repeated Nabokov's feat in many ways, although, I mean, there, there's a debate about it in the sch- in the scholarship.
But he is mostly famous for his biography, and this is what I think our scholarship is trying to fix here.
We are trying to focus more on how he was writing and what he was writing, um, how he translated himself and for what reason, rather than for, for the famous facts that he was tried for parasitism in the Soviet Union and was exiled to the north, um, and spent some years there.
And his case, his legal case became very famous worldwide, and even Sarter, uh, was writing to high Soviet officials asking for him, right? So for a long time, the focus was on his biography, and, uh, some people even ascribe his literary success to the fact that he was this famous pariah, right? Uh, or famous, um, exile.
And I think the, the scholarship today is actually digging deeper into the language itself and the poetic itself-- poetics itself.
And for me, it was important because his writing posits this age-old questions, what is a good poem? What is a good translation? In a very different angle than anything else that I encountered.
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