Room of His Own

A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodskyand the Making of a Bilingual Poet makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodskys force as a transnational poet derives paradoxically from an inward-looking stance that privileges the trope of the room and a practice of self-translation that is faithful to his own internal poetics rather than the poetic norms of the target tradition. The resulting bilingual poetics is one that, though not universally accepted by English readers, ultimately had a profound effect on the Anglo-American literary tradition and anticipated certain foreignizing tendencies that have become central to translation studies and theories of transnationalism. No less powerful than the books thesis is the elegant analyses, which encompass Brodskys Russian poetry, his translations from Russian to English, and his English-language essays.