Joseph Brodsky’s Postcards to Friends: Translingual Texts

Natasha Rulyova’s chapter is the first detailed study of Joseph Brodsky’s 32 postcard messages, including 14 postcards sent to Carl Proffer throughout the 1970s and 18 postcards sent between 1974 and 1994 to Maria Vorobiov. My analysis draws loosely on Jacques Derrida’s understanding of postcards as the spaces for shaping one’s own response to the other’s words, and is focused on aspects of interlingual translation and translingual writing, as they are applied by Brodsky, a late bilingual poet, in his postcard messages. The chapter consists of three parts: (1) a roughly chronological reading of postcard messages sent by Brodsky to each of his friends; (2) an analysis of how Brodsky addresses his friends in his postcards; (3) a study of the sender’s self-references and the ways in which Brodsky signed his postcard messages. My findings contribute to genre studies, translingual writing and Brodsky studies, as they demonstrate that the genre of postcard messages lends itself to translingual writing, including code-switching, code-meshing, envoicing, and recontextualization. The chapter shows that postcard messages are intrinsically dialogic and rely on the recipient and the sender to create meaning collaboratively, even though some postcards could be notes to oneself as much as messages to the other. This dialogism is further enriched and complicated by the sender’s ‘re-using’ the other’s language. In addition, Brodsky’s breaking of postcard genre conventions highlights their generic instability. The analysis also gives us insights into Brodsky’s relationships with his friends, his state of mind after moving to the USA, his coping strategies with being in exile, and the process of his acculturation to the Western lifestyle.