The article seeks the meeting ground between Walter Benjamin’s essay The task of the translator and Joseph Brodsky’s practice of self-translation into English.

Benjamin’s 1923 essay, written initially as a translator’s justification of the methods used in a concrete translation, has become a seminal text in translation theory. It raises questions about the role of form in poetic translation, suggests a new theory of translation as being the afterlife of the original, and indicates differences between translation and original composition as a mode of writing.

Brodsky’s experience of translation was distinct. He came to America as an exile and his reputation in his adoptive country depended on his English translations. Brodsky insisted on preserving the metrical structure of his originals and set out to correct the translations done by English native speakers. He became involved in translating his poems into English, because he believed in the principles of the Russian school of formal equimetrical translation. Benjamin had criticized the validity of these traditional translating principles in his essay, contending that reproducing the form of the original requires one to neglect its meaning. Yet, I point to several surprising parallels between Brodsky and Benjamin on the theoretical level.

Most importantly, Brodsky’s practice of self-translation into English seems to realize one of the crucial theoretical tenets put forth by Benjamin: the translator should foreignise his translation, i.e. transplant the elements of the original into the target language, thus expanding the boundaries of that language. Brodsky did not intentionally set out to foreignise his translations. The foreignisation came about because Brodsky actively tried to preserve those elements that he felt reflected his uncommon poetic voice. Thus, despite the disparity in time periods and theoretical standpoints, Brodsky’s translating practices could be said to fulfil the translator’s task as it was understood and formulated by Benjamin.

The poem Bobo’s Funeral (1972) is in such an encrypted form that its secret has still to be unraveled. Those who have written about it (Losev, Paramonov, Shraer) interpret it in a variety of ways, which testifies to the multi-layered nature of the text. My own view is that Bobo’s Funeral does not conform to any of the interpretations suggested, whether concrete or abstract. This paper provides analysis of the poem’s vocabulary, sounds, rhythm and imagery with references to Brodsky’s other poems and proves that Bobo’s Funeral is not about Akhmatova (Shraer) or the loss of fullness of being (Paramonov). My reading of Bobo’s Funeral can be summarized as follows: a highly personal biographical fact is incorporated into the poet’s world-view: nothingness, emptiness, hell, the word, language. For Brodsky, language was god and everything was sacrificed for it: personal life, health, love, children and fate itself. “Word swallows up the fate without a remnant”might serve as an epigraph to Brodsky’s works as a whole.

In this article I read Joseph Brodsky’s travel essay Flight from Byzantium against Edward Said’s Orientalism, which, as I argue, was the point of departure for Brodsky’s essay. Brodsky’s ironic detachment from what he sees and experiences on his journey is juxtaposed with his polemical engagement with the tradition of Russian and Western accounts of the Orient as well as with debates about Russia’s place on the Orient – Occident axis. His appropriation of the Orientalist myth brings forth his own identity construction on what emerges as an imaginative “contact zone” of two metropolitan cultures, Eastern and Western. Aware of the fact that Russia challenges the East – West dichotomy, the author of Brodsky’s essay uses the liminality of his own Russian identity to validate his opinions about both East and West and to invalidate the critique of this dichotomy as expressed by Said and others.

The paper is an attempt to analyse selected poems of Joseph Brodsky by employing the semantic frame method. In his poetry, Brodsky presents the linguistic worldview of astral objects such as the Sun, stars and the Moon. He also creates his own unique textual worldview of these objects, which is related to and dependent on the linguistic worldview, using a specific, original and individual language, his own idiolect. The Sun, stars and the Moon map out directions of his journey. They also make a point of reference to provoke reflection on the human being and the surrounding world. Brodsky’s poetic texts contain anthropocentric linguistic and textual worldviews in which the central position is occupied by the human being.

The poems are analysed according to contemporary cognitive semantics, where meaning is understood as changing notional structures dependent on their contextual and genre conditions. The connotations also make an important element of meaning, especially in artistic texts; for this reason, the semantic definition of meaning should be an open definition.

Brodsky’s poetry also conveys the image of the poet and traveller in different spaces and times which influence his thoughts, feelings and behaviour. His cosmology is highly extensive; it includes not only the universe, the Earth or the sky, but primarily the human being’s spiritual space. The poet’s journey has its signposts: the Sun, stars and the Moon. They are visible in many poems, especially in Christmas poems. Brodsky uses the lexemes Sun, stars and Moon in remarkable ways. His metaphors, ellipses, epithets, similes and many other means of expression create the image of a unique microcosm, the human being, travelling in the macrocosm, which is the world.

In her works, Julia Hartwig refers repeatedly to Joseph Brodsky's literary production. This paper is an attempt at interpretation of her poem Brodski, written after the death of the Nobel prize winner. Brodski is not only a farewell and a tribute, but also an extraordinary encounter with the poet, his work and his legend, as well as a “conversation” about existence, metaphysics and esthetics.

The main topic of this paper is comparative analysis of two texts by two prominent poets, laureates of the Nobel Prize: Tomas Tranströmer and Joseph Brodsky. The relationship between these writers is not limited to their long friendship and the fact that Tranströmer visited Venice in 1990, encouraged by Brodsky. My aim is to find hallmarks of modernism in two poems: La lugubre gondola no. 2 (1996) by Tranströmer and Lagoon (1976) by Brodsky. Venice, the iconic city of modernism, has been portrayed by both poets in a similar way. For Brodsky and Tranströmer, the city is a place of death and a symbol of the fall of culture. Moreover, the texts involve crucial categories of modernism, i.e. melancholy, strangeness and psychoanalytic repression. I conclude that Tranströmer and Brodsky, despite their different languages and styles, represent the European modernist tradition. In my paper, I use the methods of the history and theory of literature, comparative analysis and musicology.

Joseph Brodsky's late work is well known for its grounding in the American culture. The main aim of this paper is to trace themes and patterns Brodsky used in So Forth, and in earlier works, to become recognizable as an English poet. The author draws on David Betha's triangulation method to show the role of derivatives of Lowell's and Auden's work in Brodsky's poetry. The main components of this process are slang, musicality, self-irony and rhythmic patterns. The paper describes how Auden's strong influence can be understood as Vergilian guidance in the American landscape of writing.

During his stay in the US, Joseph Brodsky met Susan Sontag, an American essayist, one of the most influential intellectuals. In 1976, they became friends. This paper analyzes their long friendship, focusing on Brodsky’s image recorded in Sontag’s diary and in her essays. It is an attempt to reconstruct a portrait of the Russian poet on the basis of the American essayist's writings.

The aim of this paper is to reveal the growing explicitness of utterance as one of the main aspects of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems. While metaphors are mostly used in poetry at the end of the compositions, Tsvetaeva tends to start with a metaphor and then move gradually from weak to strong implicatures, and to explicatures. As the explicitness grows, the speaker, whose existence depends on expressing her own thoughts, takes more and more responsibility for what is said, thus increasingly unveiling herself. Tsvetaeva’s metaphors can be compared to a curtain raised gradually to reveal the speaker. As it turns out, their untypical role may serve as a criterion for judging the equivalence of translation.
To present Tsvetaeva’s move from the opening metaphor toward the explicit conclusion of the poem, the paper analyses Пoпытка ревности (“An Attempt at Jealousy”), one of her most famous texts. It also discusses its translations into Polish made by Wiktor Woroszylski, Joanna Salamon and Seweryn Pollak.

This article discusses a new approach to the artistic translation œvre by the Polish New Wave poets, as pursued in Arkadiusz Luboń’s recent book Przekraczanie obcości. Problemy przekładu w programach i twórczości poetów Nowej Fali [Overcoming Foreignness. Translation in the Poetic Agenda and Literary Output of the New Wave Poets]. The author successfully demonstrates how their translation activity and criticism ought to be analysed alongside their own poetic agenda and literary output, in relation to other theoretical texts and translations as well as within the historical context of their time. As it is shown, literary translation becomes for the New Wave poets a vent for their artistic and political ideas and a possibility of taking stance towards the other texts.