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) fue procesado por parasitismo social en 1964 y condenado a cinco años de trabajos forzados. Gracias a la intercesión de varios intelectuales, cumplió solo una parte de la pena, pero en 1972 acabó expulsado de la Unión Soviética. Tras dos breves estadías en Viena y Londres, se instaló en Estados Unidos, donde impartió clases en varias universidades y obtuvo una nueva nacionalidad en 1977. x{0026}lt;br x{0026}lt;/br En 1987 recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura.