"THE WINDOWS" OF CAVAFY IN THE INTERPETATION OF JOSEPH BRODSKY
The imagery of the closed space and claustrophobic symptomatology in the Cavafy’s oeuvre receives its further poetic development in “The Windows”. The pitch-dark of the mind (soul, subconsciousness) as a tragic realization of the fundamental nature of existence; impossibility/ inability/ unwillingness to cast a light upon “uncanny” within itself and in the outside world; the ambivalence of the window itself and of the consequences of its discovery are semantically transformed in the Brodsky’s translation by means of the meaning refocusing. The Russian poet either illuminates, brings closer and plays with the themes that are necessary or interesting to him, or mentions en passant highlighted one way or another motives in the source-text, or sinks in the deep subtext what is laying on the original’s surface. The semantical doublets and the wide spectrum of the literary allusions and reminiscences emerging in the translator’s word selection, determine both the veracity and the singularity of the target text, including this short but highly compressed octave not only in the context of its own creative work but also into poetic context of the Russian culture.