Joseph Brodsky, whoseSelected Poemsis a rev-
elation of the power of the word living in the
cracks of silence.’’ According to Cohen, Brodsky
is the ‘‘creator of a new language, master of
traditional forms and inventor of new ones,’’ a
poet whose ‘‘poem does not end with a resolu-
tion, but with a renovation of the problem.’’
The Russian edition ofA Part of Speech
appeared in 1977 and the English version in
1980, though the two collections do not contain
the identical group of poems. ‘‘Odysseus to Tele-
machus’’ comes from the 1980 collection. In a
New York Timesreview of this English publica-
tion, Clarence Brown remarked that a mere eight
years after he was exiled from Russia, Brodsky
had become ‘‘a fixture of our literary landscape.’’
Brown pointed out that many excellent British
and American translators, along with Brodsky’s
own efforts at translating into English, contrib-
uted to this collection’s ‘‘impression of uprooted-
ness.’’ Notwithstanding the complex process
of moving poetry from native Russian to Eng-
lish, Brodsky had, according to Brown, pro-
duced ‘‘the most powerful, the most technically
accomplished, erudite, wide ranging and consis-
tently astonishing Russian poetry being written
today.’’ This kind of critical reception was typi-
cal of the response Brodsky received for his
massive outpouring of poetry and essays, written
and published in either English or Russian dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s.
Nonetheless, in 1988, when he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature, Brodsky was gen-
erally not widely known in the United States. In
‘‘The Nobel Prize-winner Nobody Knows,’’ Glo-
ria Donen Sosin remarked on this irony: ‘‘A poet
is not only without honor in his old country,
the Soviet Union, but until the award was
announced, he had been banned. And in his
new home, the United States, he was almost
unknown.’’ Sosin explained further that had
Brodsky been allowed to publish in the Soviet
Union of the 1960s and early 1970s, upon receiv-
ing the Nobel Prize, he would have seen his
books sell out all over the country and a stadium
fill to hear him read; Sosin remarked that, by
contrast, in the United States, poetry books sell
poorly and only a small audience will attend a
poetry reading. In the late 1980s, Sosin hoped
Brodsky would gain wider recognition both in
his native country and, having won the Nobel
Prize, in his adoptive home, the United States. It
ought to happen, Sosin argued, since Brodsky’s
‘‘poetry contains wonderful imagery, and his
essays are warm and remarkable for their rich-
ness of language. His command of English, not
his mother tongue, is phenomenal.’’
Sosin’s hopes for Brodsky’s future fame
were fulfilled. In the early 1990s, he served as
U.S. poet laureate and received additional hon-
ors and recognition. Then, suddenly and far too
soon, he died at the age of fifty-six. Tatyana
Tolstaya described the shock of this loss in her
tribute included inThe Company They Kept:
Writers on Unforgettable Friendships:
When the last things are taken out of a house, a
strange, resonant echo settles in, your voice
bounces off the walls and returns to you.
There’s the din of loneliness, a draft of empti-
ness, a loss of orientation, and a nauseating
sense of freedom: everything’s allowed and
nothing matters... That is how Russian litera-
ture feels now: just four years short of the
millennium’s end, it has lost the greatest poet
of the second half of the twentieth century, and
can expect no other. Joseph Brodsky has left
us, and our house is empty.
In his native land of Russia, in his adopted
land of the United States, Brodsky made an
enormous contribution to arts and letters. The
space he vacated in dying remained palpable well
into the twenty-first century.Criticism.
Melodie Monahan
Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an
editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the follow-
ing essay, she discusses three instances in which
writers used ancient Greek myths in modern times.
In his celebrated study of myth,The Hero
with a Thousand Faces, Campbell explains how it
is that myths take different forms across the
centuries:
The outlines of myths and tales are subject to
damage and obscuration. Archaic traits are
generally eliminated or subdued. Imported
materials are revised to fit local landscape, cus-
tom, or belief... in the innumerable retellings
of a traditional story, accidental or intentional
dislocations are inevitable.
The truth behind the metamorphosis of the
archetypal pattern is that the mythic story pre-
serves since archaic times something that remains
true about the human condition and thus is rele-
vant to artists in their own time. The ancient storyOdysseus to Telemachus