The Language Zone: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet
| dc.contributor.advisor | Presto, Jenifer | |
| dc.contributor.author | Smirnova, Daria | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-12-08T16:08:12Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-12-08 | |
| dc.description.abstract | My dissertation unites several aspects of Joseph Brodsky’s writing under the arc of his development as a bilingual and transnational writer. I make the case that Brodsky’s poetic sensibility was originally transnational, i.e. exhibited an affinity with both foreign and domestic poetic traditions in pursuit of its own original poetics. I establish the trope of a speaker alone in a room as a leading poetic concept of Brodsky’s neo-Metaphysical style. The poems that are centered on this trope do not refer explicitly to the poetry of the British Baroque through intertextual references or imitation, which attests to the ability of Brodsky’s transnationally oriented poetry to process foreign traditions with subtlety and to incorporate key elements of it fully within his own idiom. I follow the new generation of researchers (Ishov, Berlina) in their attempt to “put Brodsky on the map of American studies” by paying close attention to Brodsky’s self-translation strategies and the reasons behind the negative reception of Brodsky’s English-language poetry during the time of its publication. Drawing on Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson’s concept of the bilingual text, I discover in the “English Brodsky” the tendencies characteristic of most Modernist bilingual writing. My comparative analysis of the archival materials pertaining to the translation of the poem “Dekabrʹ vo Florentsii” (“December in Florence”) shows that Brodsky’s solutions as a self-translator aim at preserving the conceptual and stylistic unity of his bilingual oeuvre. I further read Brodsky’s English prose as an attempt to rehabilitate and explain his poetic credos: the insistence on formal versification, the importance of the continuity of the poetic tradition, and estrangement as the main function of the poetic utterance. I show that Brodsky’s English writing on Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva is self-revealing as it discloses the poet’s own motivations for writing prose. Analyzing Brodsky’s autobiographical essays “Less than One” and “In a Room and a Half,” I return to the trope of a room and read his prose as a form of translation commentary that provides his new audience with a rich cultural context that is essential for a full understanding of his bilingual project. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2021-04-26 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25916 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | bilingual text | en_US |
| dc.subject | Joseph Brodsky | en_US |
| dc.subject | Metaphysical poetry | en_US |
| dc.subject | poetics | en_US |
| dc.subject | self-translation | en_US |
| dc.subject | transnational | en_US |
| dc.title | The Language Zone: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Comparative Literature | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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