Dwie Wenecje, dwa modernizmy. Josif Brodski Tomasa Tranströmera
Two Venices, Two Modernisms. Tomas Tranströmer’s Joseph Brodsky

Summary/Abstract: The main topic of this paper is comparative analysis of two texts by two prominent poets, laureates of the Nobel Prize: Tomas Tranströmer and Joseph Brodsky. The relationship between these writers is not limited to their long friendship and the fact that Tranströmer visited Venice in 1990, encouraged by Brodsky. My aim is to find hallmarks of modernism in two poems: La lugubre gondola no. 2 (1996) by Tranströmer and Lagoon (1976) by Brodsky. Venice, the iconic city of modernism, has been portrayed by both poets in a similar way. For Brodsky and Tranströmer, the city is a place of death and a symbol of the fall of culture. Moreover, the texts involve crucial categories of modernism, i.e. melancholy, strangeness and psychoanalytic repression. I conclude that Tranströmer and Brodsky, despite their different languages and styles, represent the European modernist tradition. In my paper, I use the methods of the history and theory of literature, comparative analysis and musicology.

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