one girl and her favourite poet

"Sometime in the late 1970s, as an impressionable teenager in love with Pound and Eliot, I came across an interview with Joseph Brodsky in which he said he had learned English by translating William Shakespeare and John Donne. At the time this impressed me almost literally as a command to spend a summer at my Russian uncle’s dining room table in upstate New York, surrounded by bilingual editions—Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova—and a huge red-and-white dictionary, learning rudimentary poetic Russian while my cousins were all at the pool listening to the Grateful Dead. At the time I learned the structure of a new language, and my own ways of parsing meaning. In the years that followed, when I had myself (admittedly through a kind of choice) left my country of birth and started to assemble an intellectual identity, I learned a lot more from this poet who lived out his exile so near my home..."

Read the rest in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Of course, now it's out I can only see the things I didn't say, and the things I should have thought through better! But for better or worse there it is.