Odysseus to Telemachus
Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘‘Odysseus to Telema-
chus’’ was written in 1972 at the time when
Joseph Brodsky emigrated from Russia to the
United States. It was translated into English by
George L. Kline and included in the English
collectionA Part of Speech, published by Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux in 1980, where it is the final
piece in the poem cycle entitled, ‘‘A Song to No
Music.’’ The epistolary poem borrows several
specific elements from the Homeric epicOdys-
sey. It is addressed by Odysseus to his absent son
Telemachus. The setting is Aeaea, the land ruled
by the sorceress Circe, who has changed Odys-
seus’s sailors to pigs. In the Homeric epic, when
Odysseus is in Aeaea, Telemachus is at home on
the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope.
Author Biography
Joseph (also spelled Iosif) Alexandrovich Brod-
sky was born May 24, 1940, into a Russian Jewish
family living in Leningrad, Russia (then part of
the USSR). His father was an officer in the old
Soviet navy, and after he was stripped of his rank,
the family became poverty-stricken. Brodsky
attended school until about 1956, after which he
held a wide variety of jobs, including operating a
milling machine, working in a prison morgue, and
assisting in a geological study. Through these
early years, he engaged in an energetic and
145JOSEPH BRODSKY
1972