Brodsky in English with Dr. Zakhar Ishov

This is a hybrid event, to join via Zoom use this link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/67240414468

Abstract
With this radical reassessment of Joseph Brodsky’s self-translations, Zakhar Ishov’s Brodsky in Englishproposes a fresh approach to poetry translation, one that locates the transmission ofpoetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself and challenges the assumption thatpoetic form is untranslatable. Brodsky in English draws on previously unexamined archival materials to trace the arc of Brodsky’s – the 1987 winner’s of the Nobel Prize in Literature – experience with the English language. Dr. Ishov shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation. This book highlights Brodsky’s place within the long history of the compromises translation must make between linguistic material and poetic process.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Ishov’s areas of expertise embrace Translation Studies, Post-Soviet Communication Studies, and Russian-Jewish literature. He holds two doctorates: one in Russian and Italian literature from Yale University (2015); and one in English literature and Translation Studies from FU Berlin (2008). His monograph Brodsky in English, forthcoming in August 2023 from Northwestern University Press, examines the exiled Russian poet’s radical project of translating his own poems into “new originals” in English. Brodsky in English shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States, including as Poet Laureate, anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation, locating the transmission of poetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself.

Dr. Ishov is currently an Affiliate Researchear at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. Prior to that, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and the Russian Language Coordinator in the Department of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.