Joseph Brodsky was arrested for “social parasitism” and sentenced to five years’ hard labor in Siberia. In 1972 he left Russia for America, where he translated English poetry, but it took several years before he began writing poems primarily in English. He said he wrote in English as a form protest against the Soviet Union, and also so he could reach a wider audience. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and from 1991 to 1992 he served as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Brodsky said, “Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their
reading experience and not their political programs, there would be
much less grief on earth. I believe … that for someone who has read
a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder
than for someone who has read no Dickens.”

And he said, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them
is not reading them.”

Read on, Looby-loo! Next stop. . .Goblet of Fire!

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