On Grief and Reason Essays

by Brodsky, Joseph

• ISBN13: 9780374525095
• ISBN10: 0374525099
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-10
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Joseph Brodsky was a great contrarian and believed, against the received wisdom of our day, that good writing could survive translation. He was right, I think, though you had to wonder when you saw how badly his own work fared in English. But then perhaps the Russians hadn't expelled a great poet so much as exposed us to one of their virulent personality cults. Yet Brodsky's essays are interesting. Composed in a rather heroically determined English, clumsily phrased and idiomatically challenged, they are still inventive and alive. There are suggestive analyses of favorite poems by Hardy, Rilke, and Frost in this book, and a moving meditation on the figure of Marcus Aurelius. Though too often Brodsky goes on at self-indulgent length, he usually recaptures our attention with a characteristic aside: "The fact that we are livingdoes not mean we are not sick."

Author Biography

Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) came to the United States in 1972, an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992.

Table of Contents

Spoils of War	p. 3
The Condition We Call Exile	p. 22
A Place as Good as Any	p. 35
Uncommon Visage	p. 44
Acceptance Speech	p. 59
After a Journey	p. 62
Altra Ego	p. 81
How to Read a Book	p. 96
In Praise of Boredom	p. 104
Profile of Clio	p. 114
Speech at the Stadium	p. 138
Collector's Item	p. 149
An Immodest Proposal	p. 198
Letter to a President	p. 212
On Grief and Reason	p. 223
Homage to Marcus Aurelius	p. 267
A Cat's Meow	p. 299
Wooing the Inanimate	p. 312
Ninety Years Later	p. 376
Letter to Horace	p. 428
In Memory of Stephen Spender	p. 459
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