Iosif Brodskij. Lo straniamento come "condizione metafisica"

George Steiner wrote that a whole genre of twentieth century literature is “extrater- ritorial”, a literature by and about exiles. The present paper reflects on the metaphysical implications of exile and on the estrangement that show when exile and poetry enter into dialogue. Moving from Joseph Brodsky’s essay The Condition we call Exile, the paper analyzes the sense of deep displace- ment emerging in some of the poems the author composed after leaving Soviet Union. Sameness and otherness, the poet and political exile, longing for his hometown, St. Petersburg, converge in the city of Venice and in the Homeric figure of Odysseus.