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“... no acclaimed senescence! All this, then, inevitably further confounded by translation, because, as Joseph Brodsky put it, ‘a translation, by definition, lags behind the original work.’Take​ Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, seemingly one of Hrabal’s most experimental works: a single sentence filling a short book, a monologue, or rather a ...”

“... not pluck him off; it was hard at nightto hold the road with a carcass on the windshieldJoseph Brodsky did not help. He wrote what is possibly the worst sonnet sequence ever produced on any subject on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots. His lines include the following:Mary, I call them pigs, not Picts, those Scots.And:The number of your ...”

“... than to the stone-grinders in Ecclesiastes which is Arrowsmith’s guess, documented again here. Joseph Brodsky once remarked of Andrei Platonov: ‘To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or that tradition of literature is, essentially, to move in a direction exactly opposite to the one in which he himself was moving’. The same is ...”

“... endangered both her and me, sent quickly out of the country. This was the early and mid-Sixties. Brodsky was being sent, for ‘parasitism’, to vegetate in a village near Arkhangelsk; her dangerously disloyal Requiem was being published in Munich; Sinyavsky was being exposed as Abram Tertz and sent to a camp; and her half-hearted rehabilitation, after the ...”

“... also the subject of one of the best critical essays of the last quarter-century, an explication by Joseph Brodsky). Auden, however, quickly came to dislike the poem – he had dropped the offending stanza by 1944 – principally on the grounds that it’s untrue to say that we must love one another or die, since even if we do love one another we’re all ...”

“... poet who had died in an asylum in 1937. Certainly I blush to recall that it was the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, a year ago in Nashville, Tennessee, who asked me if Gurney didn’t excite me, and I wasn’t able to answer. It is hard to find excuses. Both Blunden and Clark printed, for instance, ‘Townshend’ – a poem that honours a man who was ...”

“... both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s ...”

“... eyeballs. It was common knowledge among the laity that apart from a late-inning affair with Joseph Brodsky – he was perhaps the only brilliant talent she considered her equal (par for the course, Brodsky too proved to be a bully) – Sontag’s significant others were women of no mean measure, notably the ...”

“... he came back to the country from which he had been expelled twenty years before. The late Joseph Brodsky, asked in July 1995 if he would return, said flatly: ‘I don’t think I can. The country in which I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t step into the same river twice.’ Though he had the same qualms, Solzhenitsyn yielded to the ...”

“... with active intelligence – the greatest intelligence of the 20th century in the opinion of Joseph Brodsky. Indeed, Brodsky’s essays on Auden, collected in his recent prose volume Less than One, are thrilling evidence of what can happen when ‘the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the ...”

“... Somehow, I am always drawn to these short, pyknic or mesomorphic creators, whether they are Brodsky, Benn, Beckmann or my father. As the Nazis came up things grew abruptly tight for Beckmann. He lost his job in Frankfurt (‘public funds for Jew lackeys like Beckmann’), was pilloried in the press and increasingly prevented from showing. The day before ...”

“... Roth not only edited the series but commissioned introductions from the likes of John Updike and Joseph Brodsky for an extra imprimatur. The series lasted fifteen years, a labour of literary world citizenship that seems to have been lost in the passage of time, perhaps because American culture has never been more parochial, tuned out and ...”

“... at school in Kiev) and Platonov, until they were all swept away by Solzhenitsyn.I like to quote Joseph Brodsky’s lines from ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the 20th century, when we already/have the 19th, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or ...”

“... to the Polish-Arab Friendship Society whom he hadn’t offended. Like the speaker in Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’, here was someone to throw the book at: And when they would finally arrest me for espionage, for subversive activity, vagrancy, for ménage à trois ... It was Brodsky again ...”

“... European country). An account of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the twentieth century, when we already/have the nineteenth, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork ...”