Thursday May 4 at 12:00pm SGES professor Dr. Zakhar Ishov will give a virtual talk titled “A Jewish immigrant into English poetry: Joseph Brodsky,” based on his forthcoming book Brodsky in English: Studies in Russian Literature and Theory.

Join via Zoom
Meeting ID: 854 6236 7305
Passcode: 352257

Joseph Brodsky’s Jewishness is a topic rarely discussed in the academic literature. Arguably, however, this biographical datum was not incidental to his work nor to the way in which said work was critically received. Referred to by his English critics as “his [own] worst translator” and the “Great American Disaster,” Ishov argues that such negative judgments were embedded in antisemitic tropes and the idea of the immigrant as not being a part of the local literary club. From our globalized and multilingual horizon, Brodsky (and his Jewishness) can now appear in a different light, freed from prior nativist assumptions.

Dr. Ishov’s areas of expertise embrace Russian-Jewish literature, Translation Studies, and Post-Soviet Communication Studies. He holds two doctorates: one in Russian and Italian literature from Yale University (2015); and one in English literature and Translation Studies from FU Berlin (2008). His monograph Brodsky in English, forthcoming in August 2023 from Northwestern University Press, examines the exiled Russian poet’s radical project of translating his own poems into “new originals” in English. Brodsky in English shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States, including as Poet Laureate, anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation, locating the transmission of poetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself. 

Dr. Ishov is currently a visiting assistant professor of Russian and the Russian Language Coordinator in the Department of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.