Cuban Poetry Translated by Joseph Brodsky

Abstract

The case of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Nobel Prize for literature, is an example of the destiny of a poet in the Soviet universe. He shared with other censored authors the inability to express themselves freely through poetry and, like B. Pasternak, O. Mandelshtam, M. Tsvetaeva and many more, used poetic translation throughout the 60s as a resource to survive but also as an escape valve for literary creation. He translated English, American, Polish, Yugoslavian, Spanish, Argentinian and, in two cases, Cuban authors. The Russian versions of poems by Pablo Armando Fernández, Virgilio Piñera, Eugenio Florit and Ángel Augier by Brodsky are known. The analysis of these translations involves the study of the balance between the requirements of the historical moment, the choice of the texts to be translated, the presence of the mediating text (podstrochnik) and the relevance of the resulting text for the recipient culture and reveals several important aspects of both the work of Joseph Brodsky as of the realities of writing and translation in the socialist era.