Description
Book SynopsisBrodsky's poetic career in the West was launched when
Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published in 1973. Its translator was a scholar and war hero, George L. Kline. This is the story of that friendship and collaboration, from its beginnings in 1960s Leningrad and concluding with the Nobel poet's death in 1996.
Kline translated more of Brodsky's poems than any other single person, with the exception of Brodsky himself. The Bryn Mawr philosophy professor and Slavic scholar was a modest and retiring man, but on occasion he could be as forthright and adamant as Brodsky himself. "Akhmatova discovered Brodsky for Russia, but I discovered him for the West," he claimed.
Kline's interviews with author Cynthia L. Haven before his death in 2015 include a description of his first encounter with Brodsky, the KGB interrogations triggered by their friendship, Brodsky's emigration, and the camaraderie and conflict over translation. When Kline called Brodsky in London to congratulate him for the Nobel, the grateful poet responded, "And congratulations to you, too, George!
Trade Review“Kline emerges as human, warm and vividly idiosyncratic in the pages of Haven’s volume.”
—Stephanie Sandler, The Times Literary Supplement
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: To Please Two Shadows
- 2. A Love Affair with Language
- 3. The Leningrad poet and "a gift fit for a king"
- 4. How the KGB Defended Russian Poetry
- 5. The poet in exile: "I'll live out my days..."
- 6. The "Good Lexicon" Rule
- 7. Kline Takes Up the Gauntlet
- 8. "What did you do in World War II?"
- 9. Selected translations by George Kline
- 10. Occasional poems: George Kline, Joseph Brodsky
- 11. A bibliography of Kline's translations of Joseph Brodsky's poems
- 12. Kline Chronology
- 13. Afterword by Valentina Polukhina
- 14. Acknowledgements
