Nativity Poems: Bilingual Edition

Nativity Poems: Bilingual Edition

<p><b>Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate</b></p><p>To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the <br>steam out <br>of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team<br>of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.<br>He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.<br>--from "Star of the Nativity"</p><p>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. </p><p>In <i>Nativity Poems</i> 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.</p>