Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nativity Poems: Bilingual Edition

Nativity Poems: Bilingual Edition

Brodsky, Joseph
Brodsky, Joseph
Green, Melissa

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 0374528578
ISBN13: 9780374528577
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Nov 13 2002
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.39 Width: 4.64 Depth: 7.34
Language: English

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the
steam out
of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team
of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.
--from Star of the Nativity

Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as a Christian by correspondence, endeavored from the time he first took to writing poems seriously, to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual. He continued, I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene. There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.

In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

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