A New Brodsky Anthology Traces the Poet's Road from Leningrad to Venice
Edited by André Markowicz, "Comme un flambeau, dans ces ténèbres noires" gathers poems Joseph Brodsky wrote between 1961 and 1996, from his internal exile in the Soviet north to his final years in New York and Italy.
A new anthology of Joseph Brodsky's poetry, edited by André Markowicz and titled "Comme un flambeau, dans ces ténèbres noires," brings together poems written between 1961 and 1996, according to Le Temps. Brodsky, born in Leningrad in 1940 and dead in New York in 1996, was sentenced in 1964 to internal exile for "social parasitism" in a trial that drew international attention, and was expelled from the USSR in 1972. Taken in by the poet W. H. Auden in London, he settled in New York, became a university professor, and wrote essays and poems in Russian and later in English that were translated worldwide. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.
According to Le Temps, the anthology carries readers through the geography of Brodsky's life: Leningrad in "Une Halte dans le désert," the Arkhangelsk region where he was exiled in "Automne à Norenskaïa," Lithuania in "Un Divertissement lituanien," and Crimea in "Soir d'hiver à Yalta" — places that then belonged to the same empire. Later poems move through New York, Lisbon, London, Rotterdam and Stockholm.
Italy recurs throughout, the newspaper notes — Rome ancient and modern, Florence, Tuscany, Venice. Brodsky spent a month there each winter for more than twenty years and wrote many of his Christmas poems in Venice, describing himself as a "Christian by correspondence." Le Temps also reports that a reissue of his book devoted to the city, Acqua alta (Gallimard, 1993), is expected.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.