Tony Brinkley

Tony Brinkley

TONY BRINKLEY (Pittsburgh, 1948) is a Professor of English at the University of Maine. He has translated extensively modern Russian, German, and French poetry. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Shofar, May Day, World Literature Today, Otoliths, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press) and the co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press). His translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Gyula Kodolányi have appeared in previous issues of Hungarian Review.

THE EUROPE OF MODERN RUSSIAN POETS

“In retranslating Tsvetaeva’s Lorca translations, I have tried to keep in mind who Lorca was for readers in the Soviet Union. In 1936 near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he had been murdered by nationalists though probably not Falangists. In the struggle with fascism, he became a martyr,

BORIS PASTERNAK: STAR OF NATIVITY

“Star of the Nativity” is one of six gospel poems in the longer lyric sequence that Pasternak published as the last chapter of  Doctor Zhivago. Five of the six poems revolve around the Passion. “Star of the Nativity”is the one exception. Its aesthetic reminds me of a Roublev icon–painting as annunciation, as Pavel Florensky says – a likeness for an invisible, spiritual energy for which it is the leading wave. (Florensky is thinking by analogy of Jesus through whom God, although imageless, approaches in

IN THE AFTERMATH OF CONFLICT

Three Photographs Can a photograph tell the truth? Roland Barthes recalls the amazement he could still feel when he looked at a portrait of Jérôme Bonaparte: “Quite some time ago I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement

STALIN’S BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

If you want to know the people around you, find out what they read.– Stalin on reading [I]t is nothing but an illusion, but its laws are dictated by life.– Stalin on performance In the 1930s, while a political exile in Kazakhstan – during what Anna Akhmatova might have called a vegetarian, rather

LAST POEMS OF GYULA ILLYÉS

But listen to the end… Then nothing more… It changes its meaning. (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus) Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon… (Wallace Stevens) For me Charon’s Ferry, Bruce Berlind’s beautiful translations of Gyula Illyés’ poetry, is also a remarkable selection of last poems. Why call them “last poems”

MANDELSHTAM’S ETERNITIES

There is a Moment in every Day that Satan cannot find,Nor can his Watch Fiends find it; but the Industrious findThis Moment & it multiply: & when it once is found It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed. William Blake …and where death, if shed,Presumes no carnage,

‘WHY THE BACK BROKE’

“[W]HY THE BACK BROKE” One Woman in the War: Hungary 1944–1945, by Alaine Polcz, translated by Albert Tezla1 Two years ago Fiona Duff Kahn, an editor unknown to me, wrote from New York, inviting me to write brief personal essays for a pocket reader on books forgotten or neglected. The