Finding Home for Poetry in a Nomadic World: Joseph Brodsky and Ágnes Lehóczky

This new line of research has been suggested to me by the life and work of the Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, who, after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1972, moved to the United States, to lead a culturally ‘nomadic’ existence, which culminated, in his last years, in the abandonment of the mother tongue for the full adoption of his second language, both for prose and poetry. Departing from Brodsky’s last production and following the steps that directed him to approach and then elect English as his privileged means of expression – necessary for his personal and artistic evolution – I have examined his work focused on the urban environment, namely the one located in Venice. I have then tried to see if displacement and repeated cultural travels can be considered a ‘sought-after’ status of the contemporary writer, starting from the reading of some guiding texts, as Nomadic Subjects by Rosi Braidotti (1994), Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt (2010), and Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011) by Zygmunt Bauman, drawing from the interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving field of Migration Studies. After presenting a quick but exhaustive overview of Brodsky’s work located in Venice, I addressed my research to contemporary English poetry, to which Brodsky was considered to belong, to look for a correspondence with a new author, who also focuses on cultural nomadism, displacement, and the adoption of English as vehicle of artistic creation and I found a thematic resonance in the recent work of Ágnes Lehóczky, essayist and poet, Hungarian by birth, and British by adoption, who belongs to the cultural movement of the ‘British Poetic Revival.’ The focus of my research has then been the investigation of Lehóczky’s ‘post-avant-garde’ poetry – still unpublished in Italian – to highlight some affinities in the works of the two authors, who, although belonging to two generations and two essentially different stylistic registers, find similar ways to explore the reality around them. Lehóczky's texts offer new visions of the urban spaces in the cultural crossroads offered by today's technologized cities, where global relationships and the coexistence of multiple languages contribute to the creation of new identities, but where history must also become a fundamental element in understanding the present. Space, time and language play the main role in building her original, ‘holistic’ and at the same time ‘palimpsestic’ view of the world. It is a vision that, while recognizing in the mobility of contemporary man the traces of a nomadism which has always existed, finds in Lehóczky's poems a correspondence in the perspectives of the lyrical observer, to offer the readers visions that span in horizontality and in verticality, for instance from the top of a hill in Budapest, to the catacombs of an English gothic cathedral, according to the principles of 'psychogeography.' English, far from being simply a lingua franca, absorbes the influences of the authors’ mother tongues – ‘phagocyting’ in some way these latter – and is thus enriched with new features, becoming not only a new language, but a ‘space in-between’ that protects and welcomes the nomadic writers, and forges their new identities. Faced with the impossibility of defining the boundary of language and identity, because of the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself, these authors suggest if not answers, new richer languages and modalities, to extend the boundaries of contemporary literary expression.