Daria Smirnova’s informative and thought-provoking study of Joseph Brodsky’s translations and self-translations is a welcome addition to the growing body of studies on Brodsky’s poetics and his transnational identity. The book draws on existing studies on Brodsky’s poetics and translation practices produced by David Bethea, Alexandra Berlina, Natalya Rulyova, and Zakhar Ishov. Smirnova’s insightful analysis of Brodsky’s works focuses on his linguistic and poetic hybridizations with the view to highlight the poet’s significance not only to Russian literature but also to Anglophone poetry. Smirnova’s interest in Brodsky’s bilingualism reinforces the need expressed by Berlina and Ishov to “put Brodsky on the map of Americal studies” (15) and “to encompass Brodsky in his totality of his bilingual and bi-traditional significance” (15). Favorably comparing Brodsky’s conceptualization of translating with Walter Benjamin’s vision of the task of the translator, Smirnova states that Brodsky’s “bilingual writing in the form of self-translation does appear to happen in the zone where distinctions between particular languages are blurred and it is only the language of poetry that matters” (23).

The book comprises an Introduction, three chapters, Conclusion, Bibliography, Index and two Appendixes. The first chapter, “The Metaphysical Room: Brodsky and the Poetics of the British Baroque” analyzes metaphysical aspects of Brodsky’s poetry and his neo-Metaphysical style (29) with the help of Helen Gardner’s approach to metaphysical poetry as found in her book Metaphysical Poets (1957). According to this approach, the main features of the Metaphysical style include “its orientation towards a limited audience,” “the use of the major metaphor of a poem … as a line of argument,” “the conflation of high and low styles,” “the dramatism of the immediate moment,” and “the tendency towards superimposition of distant ideas” (29). Albeit Smirnova argues compellingly that Brodsky’s poetry has a lot in common with the British Baroque, she overlooks some striking similarities between Brodsky’s metaphysical poems and Gavriil Derzhavin’s poems comprising “the interconnection of distant ideas,” as Iurii Tynianov puts in his book, Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929, 533).

Chapter 2, “Brodsky’s Self-Translations as a Bilingual Text,” meticulously discusses Brodsky’s engagement with Daniel Weissbort and Derek Walcott. Smirnova suggests that that owing to Walcott’s ability to reproduce many nuances of Brodsky’s poems, as a translator he “come as close to Brodsky’s idea of freedom within formal verse as it was possible for anybody but the author himself” (113). Chapter 3, “Expansion of Isolation: Brodsky’s Translation between Genres,” provides insightful observations on Brodsky’s prose and its reception by English readers. The chapter concludes by stating that Brodsky’s perseverance in translation between languages, traditions, and genres secured him an isolated place (or room?) on the literary stage, one that made his voice unique and his readers–always stimulated” (155).

In summary, Smirnova’s study brings together several aspects of Brodsky’s writing with the aim of demonstrating different stages of his development as a bilingual and transnational poet. In Smirnova’s opinion, “Brodsky’s poetic sensibility was originally transnational” because his poetry exhibited a strong affinity “with both foreign and domestic poetic traditions in pursuit of its own original aesthetics” (154). The study compares many drafts of Brodsky’s self-translations against the drafts of his translators. It demonstrates that Brodsky aspired to preserve the conceptual and stylistic unity of his bilingual works. Smirnova also suggests that most of Brodsky’s English-speaking translators lacked the knowledge of Russian language and poetry and “did not quite imagine the degree and the complexity” of Brodsky’s involvement with the European canon, “which was the foundation of Brodsky’s poetic sensibility” (155). It is a pity that Smirnova does not engage with Tomas Venclova’s article “A Journey from Petersburg to Istanbul,” which effectively analyzes the English and Russian versions of Brodsky’s essay “A Journey to Istanbul,” which was translated into English by Alan Myers along with the author. Venclova’s essay argues that the two versions contain different allusions, intratextual commentary, and jokes due to their orientation towards different literary subtexts, revealing thereby Brodsky’s ability to address different readerships.

Smirnova’s book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in transnational Russophone poetry, translation studies, exilic studies, and comparative literature. It sheds new light on understudied aspects of Brodsky’s continuous reinvention of himself, from a representative of Leningrad poetry in the 1960s to a transnational poet who shared his anti-Romantic stance with several English-language poets, including W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell.