“The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English” in the TLS: “Kline emerges as human, warm and vividly idiosyncratic in the pages”
Monday, June 7th, 2021
The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline is finally in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement. We’d seen the online version, but there’s nothing like viewing the printed page – so here it is for you. In the words of reviewer Stephanie Sandler: “[George] Kline emerges as human, warm and vividly idiosyncratic in the pages of [Cynthia] Haven’s volume …” Also reviewed, the Selected Poems 1968-1996, edited by Ann Kjellberg, and Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Self-Translation, by Natasha Rulyova.
From Ann Kjellberg’s introduction to the new Selected, which was published in English in The New York Review of Books and in Russia’s Colta: “We now live in a time of which Brodsky was an advance scout – a time when any writers operate beyond their original borders and outside their mother tongues, often, like Brodsky, bearing witness to violence and disruption, often answering, through art, to those experiences, in language refracted, by necessity, through other language. In Brodsky’s moment there was a cluster of poets, some from the margins of empire, some, like Brodsky, severed from their roots – Walcott, Heaney, Paz, Milosz, to name a few – who brought with them commanding traditions, as well as the imprint of history’s dislocations. We would do well now to attend to their song, standing as they did in our doorway between a broken past and the language’s future.”
And read the whole story of Brodsky’s “rich, complicated legacy” in the TLS here.
