EN
The article examines the way a bilingual poet Joseph Brodsky translated one of his Russian language poems into English. Taking this lyrical poem as an example, the article aims to identify the poet’s practical approach to translation. It starts by examining how the poet views the poetic form and the translation process, and then proceeds to analyse both texts at different levels of verse structure to allow the reader to compare and understand the semantic functions of the poet’s choices. The conclusion is that, when recreating his poem in English, Brodsky primarily seeks to follow the formal matrix of the Russian original through mimetic translation. By so doing, he effectively “Russianizes” his English while trying to respect the nature of his target language at the same time. The article ends by proposing an interpretation of both texts which shows that, in reality, they are actually quite similar.