Brodsky le newyorkais (Swiss Stories 2013, by Jean-Jacques Kissling) - Swiss Press Award
Le courrier de geneve
Jean-Jacques Kissling
Photographic research carried out for the Courier on June 29, 2012 in New York, by Joseph Brodsky, the New Yorker. A city like New York has a habit of adopting persecuted artists, and Joseph Brodsky was one of them. He was born in 1940 in Leningrad and was tried at the age of 24 for "social parasitism." Upon his return, he had lost everything, but his poems had already crossed the border. The Soviets gave him 10 days to leave the country. A difficult departure into exile, he knew he would never see his parents, his friends, or his city again. But his desire to write was stronger. He left for Vienna, then Italy, and finally New York. The Big Apple would provide him with the necessary breeding ground for his art to flourish. He translated Shakespeare into Russian, gave lectures at universities, wrote for the New York Times, but always composed these poems in Russian. His work was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. He lived in a small apartment at 44 Morton Street, a stone's throw from the Hudson River. This is where he liked to walk; the old moorings, worn by the swell and blackened by the sun, were dots and lines resembling the words he loved. He died in 1996; he had bought a place in the Broadway Cemetery, but he was buried in Venice. A few days before his death, he wrote to all his friends asking them not to speak of his life before 2020. Death is an opening to the writing of poets.
