On Grief and Reason

Resumen del libro

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."

Biografía del autor

Joseph Brodsky(San Petersburgo, 1940 - Nueva York, 1996), poeta y ensayista exiliado de la antigua Unión Soviética en 1972, recibió en 1987 el Premio Nobel de Literatura. Está enterrado en el cementerio de San Michele de Venecia. Ediciones Siruela ha publicado x{0026}lt;em Menos que uno x{0026}lt;/em (2006) y x{0026}lt;em Del dolor y la razónx{0026}lt;/em (2015).