Brodsky's Travelling Exile Pays Homage to Venice

Joseph Brodsky’s talent as poet and essayist was internationally acknowledged after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972. Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991, Brodsky soon became an honoured professor and lecturer, travelling extensively in the United States, South America and Europe. With a special affection for Italy, he saw in Rome the representation of classicism and empire, in Florence the embodiment of language and exile, while Venice, where he used to come every year, represented the ideal site to feel the estrangement (or ostranenie) he deemed necessary for an artist. A reflection of his home city Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Venice thus discloses a discursive space to analyse all the major themes of his work: displacement and identity, culture and transculturation, language and time. From his early poems in Russian later translated into English, through the intense prose of the autobiographical essay Watermark, Brodsky leads us through the transformation of his lyric-self, from a Russian exiled poet into an American flâneur writer.