Russia: Translating Joseph Brodsky · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

David McDuff of A Step At A Time has posted an interview with himself, in which he talks about what it was like to work with Joseph Brodsky on his poetry and prose translations: “I think it needs to be remembered that for Joseph the process of translating his own poems was in many ways not ‘translation’ in the usual sense at all. He used to talk of ‘throwing away the original, as it’s not important now’. The idea was to create a new poem in English – and that was going to involve reliving some of the same existential tensions that had led to the writing of the Russian version.”