On Grief and Reason: Essays (FSG Classics)

About this book

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 hadnt expelled a great poet so much as exposed us to one of their virulent personality cults. Yet Brodskys 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."