English Rhythms in Russian Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] Book 232)

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian. Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors? The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means. Acknowledgements 7 A note on copyright and transliteration 9 Introduction 13 1. Brodsky’s predecessors: Rules, violations, semantics 22 1.1. Introduction 22 1.2. The Monosyllable Rule 24 1.3. The Stress Maximum Principle 30 1.4. The Monosyllable Rule: Brodsky’s English sources 32 1.5. The Monosyllable Rule: Brodsky’s Russian sources 35 1.6. Unstressed syllables in W positions: Regressive Dissimilation (RD) 39 1.7. Counting methods 46 1.8. Anti-RD rhythm: Brodsky’s English predecessors 48 1.9. Anti-RD rhythm: Brodsky’s Russian sources 52 1.10. Elision and redundant syllables: Brodsky’s English sources 54 1.11. Elision and redundant syllables: Brodsky’s Russian predecessors 59 1.12. Conclusion 63 2. Redundant syllables: Elision in Brodsky’s verse 65 2.1. Introduction 65 2.2. Brodsky’s redundant syllables: A description 66 2.3. English elision 70 2.4. Phonological regularities in Brodsky 73 2.5. Brodsky’s rule and recitation 80 2.6. Brodsky and Slutsky 86 2.7. Semantic associations of disrupted meter and elision 91 2.8. Conclusion 94 3. Brodsky’s anti-RD rhythm: semantics and sources 97 3.1. Introduction 97 3.2. The “English” uses of Brodsky’s anti-RD 99 3.3. The rhythm of exile 102 3.4. The form of Brodsky’s anti-RD: English or Russian? 111 3.5. Brodsky’s Russian predecessors: Bely, Khodasevich, Tsvetaeva 115 3.6. Conclusion 131 Conclusion 134 Appendices 138 I. Changes from Brodsky’s drafts to final versions 138 II. 100 randomly-selected words with the shape -Xxx- in the prose of Brodsky, Slutsky, and Donne 140 III. Words with the shape -Xxx- in elision positions in the verse of Donne, Brodsky, and Slutsky 152 IV. Statistical tests of words with the shape -Xxx- in poetry and prose 157 V. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky’s iambic poems 162 VI. Anti-RD rhythm in Tsvetaeva’s iambic poems 183 VII. Anti-RD rhythm in Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, and Donne 188 References 195 Author index 218 Subject index 221 It is often said that the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ""sounds English"" when he writes in Russian, yet, it is far from clear what this statement really means. Using evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and approaches, the book investigates the form and semantic aura of Brodsky's experimental rhythm and proposes a new approach to analyzing poetic innovation It is often said that the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky "sounds English" when he writes in Russian, yet, it is far from clear what this statement really means. Using evidence from a variety of disciplines, this book investigates the form and semantic aura of Brodsky's experimental rhythm and proposes a new approach to analyzing poetic innovation.