Nativity Poems: Bilingual Edition

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate. To Him all things seemed enormous: His mothers breast the steam out of the oxs nostrils Caspar Balthazar Melchior the teamof Magi the presents heaped by the door ajar.He was but a dot and a dot was the star.--from Star of the Nativity. 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 were 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. . In Nativity Poems 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 Lemkhins photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.