How Iosif Brodskij Definetly Became Joseph Brodsky: a Lifelong Influence of English

“I have a love affair with the English language”, Iosif Brodskij used to say when interviewed about his attitude towards his second language. This sometime-troubled relationship had started long before his emigration to the United States in 1972, after his expulsion from the Soviet Union for social parasitism. Brodskij traced back his fascination for the English language to his youth years in Leningrad, when he watched the few “trophy films” allowed by the regime, and avidly read Western literature, searching for new models of individualism, as opposed to the conformism imposed by the Soviet ideology. During the first exile in Norenskaya, in winter 1964, Brodskij recounted having had an “epiphany” reading a poem by Wystan Auden: he found the deep link between language, individual consciousness and poetry. The famous English poet was to become the addressee of Brodskij’s literary work, his “invisible reader” – as he explained in the autobiographical essay “To Please a Shadow”. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, still clear had to be kept the divide in his work: poetry in Russian and prose in English. His nomination as Poet Laureate proved to be a final turning point in his work - undoubtedly a way to avoid the endless corrections he made to the translations of his poems, but not only. This paper aims to trace the steps that led one of the most representative contemporary authors to leave his mother tongue and definitely become “Joseph Brodsky”, the “English way”.