SOURCE: "Speaking for Language," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, February 1, 1996, pp. 28-31.

Coeizee is a South African writer. In the mixed review of the essay collection On Grief and Reason below, he examines Brodsky's views on poetry and discusses the poet's relationship to Russian literature.

In 1986 Joseph Brodsky published Less than One, a book of essays. Some of the essays were translated from the Russian; others he wrote directly in English, showing that his command of the language was growing to be near-native.

In two cases, writing in English had a symbolic importance to Brodsky: in a heartfelt homage to W. H. Auden, who greatly helped him after he was forced to leave Russia in 1972, and whom he regards as the greatest poet in English of the century; and in a memoir of his parents, whom he had to leave behind in Leningrad...