Thirty years after the Russian exile and Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1981, AAR will present “A Tribute to Joseph Brodsky” on March 17–18, 2011.
Six international writers—Roberto Calasso (Italy), Boris Khersonsky (Russia), Mary Jo Salter and AAR Trustee and 1983 Resident Mark Strand (USA), 2011 AAR Resident Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), and Adam Zagajewski (Poland) will gather to read from their own work in honor of Brodsky and then to read from Brodsky’s work. They will also converse about Brodsky’s life and literary legacy and respond to questions from the audience, in a two-part program made possible by the generous support of AAR Trustee Nancy M. O’Boyle, the Embassy of the United States of America in Rome, and the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund.
Involuntarily exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky settled in the United States but maintained close ties with Italy, particularly with Venice (a city chronicled in his beautiful memoir Watermark) and Rome (for after all, Peter the Great had founded his city to be the Third Rome).
Brodsky was, by circumstance and necessity, a citizen of the world; he famously said of himself, “I’m a Jew; a Russian poet; an American citizen.” His poem “A Part of Speech” begins, “I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland / by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on / in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice / that ripples between them….”
And for Brodsky, as for his close friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Derek Walcott, poetry and its rhymes are felt as an expression of landscape itself, as an expression of a place sometimes loved and lost.
On Thursday, March 17 at 7:00pm, “Tribute” participants will gather in the Aula Magna Regina of the Frank J. Guarini Campus of John Cabot University in Trastevere to read from their own work.
Roberto Calasso will present a new memoir, “Speaking with Brodsky”; Mary Jo Salter, Mark Strand, and Derek Walcott will all read poems in honor of Brodsky or dedicated to him as well as additional poems of their own, joined by Adam Zagajewski and Boris Khersonsky, who was a Fellow at AAR under the auspices of the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund.
The reading will be presented chiefly in English, with a PowerPoint projection of the Italian and Russian texts where appropriate.
On Friday, March 18 at 8:30 PM in the Sala Aurelia of AAR’s Villa Aurelia, “Tribute” participants will present a selection of Brodsky’s poems in English, Italian, and Russian (again with an accompanying PowerPoint projection of translations and original texts).
Their readings will include classic Brodsky poems such as “Letters to a Roman Friend” (modeled on Martial) as well as work both early (“Six Years Later,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in a translation by Richard Wilbur in 1979) and late (“To My Daughter,” first published in 1994).
An intermission follows, during which books in English and in Italian by Brodsky and by “Tribute” participants will be on sale, and during which audience members will have a chance to see Roman artist Federica Dal Falco’s lightbox installation Escape from Byzantium in Fragments, inspired by Brodsky.
Tribute participants then will reconvene to participate in a conversation (with simultaneous translation provided) about the poet’s life and work, moderated by the poet and Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Karl Kirchwey (1995 Fellow).
“A Tribute to Joseph Brodsky” is presented by AAR in collaboration with the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, John Cabot University, the Casa delle Letterature/Comune di Roma, and the University of Rome La Sapienza.
In addition, “Tribute” participants will participate in outreach school visits on Friday, March 18 to the Liceo Classico Luciano Manara, in Monteverde, and to Saint Stephen’s School, on the Aventine. Groups of students from both schools will attend the Tribute on the evening of March 18.