General & Miscellaneous Religion, General & Miscellaneous Poetry

Nativity Poems : Bilingual Edition

Name: Nativity Poems : Bilingual Edition
Author: Joseph Brodsky
ISBN: 9780374528577

by Joseph Brodsky

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Overview

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam out of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.

He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

—from "Star of the Nativity"

Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life—or, at the very least, existence—in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place—which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.

In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

About the Author, Joseph Brodsky

The poet, essayist, and playwright 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.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Most poets would benefit from having Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht render their poems in English—even if the poems were in English already [and in these versions] at times you hear something, not like a bell, but like an echo, of what this poet must sound like in Russian . . . Brodsky, who liked to pass Christmas in Venice, that sinking monument to the decay of architecture and belief, saw with what magnificence a skeptic could contemplate centuries past—these poems express a fealty to the past without being enslaved by it. And there is, almost like frailty, the doubt beneath Brodsky's doubt—you sense he felt the myths might just possibly be true ..."—William Logan, The New Criterion

Publishers Weekly

Beginning when he "first took up writing poems seriously," former U.S. poet laureate Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996 at age 56, wrote a Christmas poem each year. Of the 18 Nativity Poems of this holiday collection, 10 are previously untranslated, and are presented bilingually. Among the renderers are Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, Paul Muldoon, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and Brodsky himself. Glyn Maxwell's excellent version of "Speech over Spilt Milk" finds "God/ has lighted in the blue immense/ the planets, icon lamps to glow/ before the face we cannot know./ What's poetry but a review/ of the existing evidence." (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Every year from 1962 to 1993 during the Christmas season, Nobel prize-winning poet Brodsky, who came to the United States in 1972 as an exile from the Soviet Union, endeavored to write a "nativity poem." Frequently a loner, the poet often wrote with an acerbic "bah-humbug" sort of air, as in the poem tellingly titled, "Speech over Spilled Milk": "O, the damnable craft of the poet./ The phone doesn't ring, and the future? A diet." Other poems center on the event of the nativity. Brodsky was, in his own words, "not a churchgoer" and a "Christian by correspondence" who was "sometimes a believer and sometimes not." Yet in "Flight into Egypt" he wrote, "Not divining his role, the Infant drowsed/ in a halo of curls that would quickly become/ accustomed to radiance." For this enjoyable collection, six poets (including the author) have ably undertaken the translations from the original Russian (which appears on facing pages), preserving in most cases the meter of the original. The collection ends with an illuminating conversation with the author. Highly recommended. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.