Subterranean Fire by Natalka Bilotserkivets

SUB TERRANEAN FIRE

THE SELECTED POETRY OF NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS

SUBTERRANEAN FIRE:

THE SELECTED POETRY OF NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS

Translations by James Brasfield with Lada Kolomiyets, Olena Jennings, Michael M. Naydan, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Andrew Sorokowski, Myroslava Stefaniuk, Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

Compiled and edited by Michael M. Naydan

Introductory materials by Michael M. Naydan

Afterword by Ludmyla Taran

Cover image © Mykola Kumanovsky (2021)

Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor

© 2022, Michael M. Naydan, James Brasfield, Lada Kolomiyets, Olena Jennings, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Andrew Sorokowski, Myroslava Stefaniuk,Virlana Tkacz, Wanda Phipps

Afterword © 2022, Ludmyla Taran

© 2022, Natalka Bilotserkivets

© 2022, Glagoslav Publications

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-912894-93-2

ISBN: 978-1-912894-94-9

First published as a collection by Glagoslav Publications in January 2022

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

SUB TERRANEAN FIRE

THE SELECTED POETRY OF NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS

Translations by James Brasfield with Lada Kolomiyets, Olena Jennings, Michael M. Naydan, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Andrew Sorokowski, Myroslava Stefaniuk, Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Virlana Tkacz’s and Wanda Phipps’s translation of “A Knife” first appeared in Visions International, 61 (Fall 1999). Their translation of “The Saxophonist” was first published in Leviathan Quarterly (June 2002), and their translation of “May” appeared first in AGNI 34 (Fall 1991). Their translation of “Crazed Airplanes” was published originally in the 33-rd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, 2002. Their translation of “May” was performed as the core text of Yara Arts Group’s “Explosion” at the LaMaMa Theater in January 1992 and received the Translation Prize from the journal AGNI at Boston University in 1992.

“We’ll Not Die in Paris” translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky first appeared in From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine (Zephyr Press, 1996). Her translations of “Water trembles...,” “Wine of Angels,” and “Rose” appeared in Leviathan Quarterly, No. 4 (June 2002).

“A Hundred Years of Youth” translated by Myroslava Stefaniuk was first published in A Hundred Years of Youth (Litopys Publishers, 2000).

“The Picasso Elegy,” “Stumbling under the Stars” and “Rain... Rain in the cities of Lviv and Ternopil...” translated by Michael M. Naydan and Dzvinia Orlowsky appeared first in From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine (Zephyr Press, 1996). The volume used American poets and prose writers, who, paired with translators, provided editorial suggestions for the translations that appeared in the volume.

Olena Jennings’s translations of “Not one love affair...,” “Embroidery,” “Swallows,” “Serpents,” “Old Lovers,” and “Fish” were published in Chelsea, 78 (2005): 154-159. Her translations of “Lame Duckling,” “That life...,” “Knife,” and “Love in Kyiv” appeared in International Poetry Review, 33, 2 (Fall, 2007): 31-37. She translated Natalka Bilotserkivets’s collection Allergy as part of her master’s thesis at the U. of Alberta: “Time and Travel in Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Allergy” (Edmonton, Canada, 2003).

Michael M. Naydan’s translations of “We’ll Die Not in Paris” (aka “Forgotten lines scents colors and sounds”), “The Letter,” and “The Calfskin Jacket” appeared in International Poetry Review (2010).

The translation of “The Ancient City’s Face” by Andrew Sorokowski first appeared in Subprimal Poetry and Arts, No. 10 (2017) https://subprimal.com/. His translations of “Water Nymph,” “Boys’ Choir,” “February,” “Embroidery,” “Knife,” and “Rain” were first published in Peacock Journal (January 2018) http://peacockjournal.com/.

Ludmyla Taran’s afterword “The Underground Fire of Eternal Youth” was translated from her article “Nota Bene: Natalka Bilotserkivets’,” which appeared on May 14, 2011 in the online literary portal LitAktsent. It appeared with some emendations under the newer title provided here in Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected works, My pomrem ne v Paryzhi, which was published by AB-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA Publishers in 2015. The graphic work used for the cover design is by Mykola Kumanovsky and comes from the private art collection of Natalka Bilotserkivets.

I am grateful to Svitlana Budzhak-Jones for her excellent editorial suggestions on my translation of Ludmyla Taran’s afterword and my translation of the poem “November.”

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THE TRANSLATORS

JAMES BRASFIELD has received the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for Translation, the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, two Senior Fulbright Fellowships to Ukraine, and fellowships in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, both with Louisiana State University Press: Infinite Altars (2009) and Ledger of Crossroads (2016), and The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications, 2000).

OLENA JENNINGS’s collection of poetry Songs from an Apartment was released in 2017 by Underground Books. Her translations of poetry from Ukrainian can be found in Chelsea, Poetry International, and Wolf. She has published fiction in Joyland, Pioneertown, and Projectile. She completed her MFA in writing at Columbia University and her MA focusing in Ukrainian literature at the University of Alberta. Pray to the Empty Wells by Iryna Shuvalova, translated by Olena Jennings and the author, appeared with Lost Horse Press in 2019 and Absolute Zero by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyna appeared with Glagoslav Publishers in 2020.

LADA KOLOMIYETS Doctor of Philology and Professor of the Department of theory and practice of translation from English at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. She is a recipient of Fulbright scholarships at the University of Iowa (1996-97) and the Pennsylvania State University (201718). Her main research interests lie in literary translation and the history of translation. Her books include several monographs and literary anthologies in Ukrainian and book chapters in English. She is currently working on an Anthology of New Multicultural Voices in American Literature in her own translations into Ukrainian.

MICHAEL M. NAYDAN is the Woskob Family Professor of UkrainianStudies at The Pennsylvania State University and translator, co-translator

and/or editor of over 40 books of translations from Ukrainian and Russian, more than 40 articles, and over 80 publications of translations in literary journals and anthologies.

DZVINIA ORLOWSKY is Pushcart prize recipient, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She is the author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reprinted in 2009 as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary Series; Convertible Night, Flurry of Stone, for which she received a 2010 Sheila Motton Book Award; and Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Alexander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House Between Water in 2006.

WANDA PHIPPS is the author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX[books]) and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press). She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines and numerous anthologies.

ANDREW SOROKOWSKI was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1950 and grew up in San Francisco. He has studied both Romance and Slavic languages. He has also worked as a lecturer, researcher, writer, editor, and translator. Retired from the US Department of Justice, he currently lives near Washington, DC.

MYROSLAVA STEFANIUK, writer, translator and educator, was born in Ukraine, emigrated to the States via Displaced Persons camps in Germany and currently lives in Michigan. She has authored works on Ukrainian immigration history, the creative arts, and also publishes her own prose and poetry. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian poetry and prose have been published in the USA, Canada, and Ukraine.

VIRLANA TKACZ heads the Yara Arts Group and has directed thirty original shows at La MaMa Theatre in New York, as well as in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar and Ulan Ude. She received an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for her translations with Wanda of Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry. www.yaraartsgroup.net.

VIRLANA TKACZ and WANDA PHIPPS as a translating team have received the Agni Poetry Translation Prize, the National Theatre Translation Fund Award and 12 translation grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Their translations have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and are integral to the theatre pieces created by Yara Arts Group. Their translations of the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan have most recently appeared in the volumes Mesopotamia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2018), What We Lived For, What We Die For (New Haven: Yale UP, 2019).

FOREWORD

A NOTE FROM THE COMPILER

It has been a pleasure for me to compile this collection of translations of the poetry of preeminent Ukrainian poet Natalka Bilotskerivets, one of the best of the 1980s generation of Ukrainian poets. The poet in fact partly suggested the concept of the volume to me, which at times includes translations of the same poem by various translators, which will give readers a “stereoscopic” view of the poetry, a term coined by Marilyn Gaddis Rose and refined by Alla Perminova. Therefore, I have intentionally refrained from giving editorial suggestions on the translations of the eight other translators contributing to this edition. Each translator or team of translators expresses his, her, or their own voice and interpretation as co-authors of the English versions. Thus readers, unfamiliar with the original Ukrainian, by reading the multiple translations of the same poem, should be able to recreate a more complete sense of the original as well as choose the interpretation that works best for them in English.

I have maintained a chronological approach to the poems presented in this volume, presenting selections from Natalka Bilotserkivets’s four key mature collections in which she reaches the height of her poetic talents. Translations of poems appear in the collection in which they were first published and in the order in which they appear in that particular edition. I have organized the structure this way because subsequent collections of Bilotserkivets’s poetry often incorporated poems published in previous editions. To allow readers to compare the translations to the original Ukrainian, I have noted the page numbers of the original collections in which they were published in an appendix on pages 148-150 of this volume. I have also decided not subjectively to create a hierarchy of translations, but rather to present the translations in alphabetical order of the translators’s last names. Readers, of course, are welcome to read through the book in any order they prefer. I have kept footnotes to a minimum and offered translators’s notes when they have provided them. Instead of offering a detailed introduction

of my own to the volume I have included a translation of Ludmyla Taran’s quite comprehensive introduction to Bilotserkivets’s works that appeared in the Internet journal LitAkcent as well as in Ivan Malkovych’s handsome volume of the poet’s selected poetry published by his A-BA-MA-LA-HAHA Publishing House in Kyiv. Taran, a notable poet in her own right, is one of the poet’s closest and lifelong friends and offers unique insights into her life, milieu, and in the way in which her reading of other myriad poets has served to shape her own poetics.

A NOTE ON THE POET

I have known Natalka Bilotserkivets since the early 1990s. I remember meeting her while I was traveling in Ukraine at International Association of Ukrainian Studies conferences in Kyiv and Lviv. She, her husband, the writer and noted essayist and scholar Mykola Riabchuk, and their two children Nastya and Yurchyk came to Penn State University in 1994 on a Fulbright grant from newly independent Ukraine. Upon meeting Natalka for the first time, I was struck immediately by the fact that she was such a knowledgeable, well-read person, but also a warm, gentle, and kind human being. She was plainspoken, introspective, and compassionate, and always focused on others as a great listener and observer.

Natalka’s poetry impressed me immediately with its elegiac quality that captured in intimate ways the profound philosophical questions of life, mortality, and the human condition. Her originally untitled poem, known to generations in Ukraine by the song entitled “We’ll Die Not in Paris” by the legendary Lviv rock band Dead Rooster (Mertvyi piven’), truly became an anthem for her generation. You can listen to it on YouTube in the original version featuring the lead vocal of Yaryna Yakubiak: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=IT7TV21Zio8. It is also available in a more recent live version featuring Kasha Saltsova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOZFprrH4PQ.

Even in her early poetry Natalka rejected the tenets of socialist realism that were forcibly imposed on soviet writers from the 1930s on. Her poetry instead focused on her inner emotional life and observations of her interpreted world, normal domains of lyric poetry in open societies but not in the repressive USSR, whose harsh-sounding Cyrillic name CCCP Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once remarked was impenetrable because of its lack of vowels. Natalka in her poetry never focused on the collective or soviet icons imposed on the general public, but she also never overtly published political poems in opposition to the soviet state. She also did not belong to any of

the kind of popular literary groups that became so prominent during the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s in Ukraine.1 Instead, she continued along her own individualized path. Her poetry managed to capture the essence of her historical time and place, all with a deep sense of conscience and humanity. Natalka has published six individual collections of her poetry and a more recent selected works edition, My pomrem ne v Paryzhi (A-BA-BA-HA-LAMA-HA Publishers, 2015). Those six major collections include: Ballad of the Unconquered (Балада про нескорених; 1976), In the Land of My Heart (У країні мого серця; 1979), Subterranean Fire (Підземний вогонь; 1984), November (Листопад; 1989), Allergy (Алергія; 1999), and Hotel Central (Готель Централь; 2004). In terms of her poetics, readers can observe a shift from traditional rhyme and meter in her early collections to free verse in later volumes, particularly during the last few years of the Soviet Union and following Ukrainian independence in 1991. One can also observe both in her overt as well as more deeply embedded references that she is a voracious reader of poetry, her own native Ukrainian (particularly Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Lina Kostenko, et al), Russian classics (including Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva), European, as well as world poets. Her themes consistently focus on a personal quest for enlightenment and human understanding. Her evident love for her Ukrainian homeland appears not so much in overtly political ways, but in her love of its nature, her empathy for the downtrodden, and sometimes in more subtle ways including emblems such as the guelder rose (kalyna). Note that in the title of her first collection (In the Land of my Heart), if you close the space between the first two words, it changes the meaning to To the Ukraine (Ukraini) of My Heart.

The poet’s most dynamic season clearly is autumn, the time of harvest, ripeness, maturity, and change. She finds joy and sadness in meetings and partings in life, love and loss, and memories of lost love that sustain later in life, but there is also beauty in the colors and rustling of leaves that stir the poet’s cogitation on the cycle of life and what it truly means to be human. The autumnal season in particular is a springboard for Bilotserkivets’s poetic interpretations of the world. Her entire collection November (1989), which literally in Ukrainian means “leaf-falling” (lystopad), comprises a meditation on the symbolic nature of the season. Autumn and rain, the latter of

1 For a discussion of some of those groups see my article “Ukrainian Avant-Garde

Poetry Today: Bu-Ba-Bu and Others” that appeared in Slavic and East European Journal , 50.3 (Fall 2006): 454-470.

which often occurs as a leitmotif in the poet’s poetry, lead her to ruminate on the passing of time and changes both reflected in nature and in her own life. Several of her elegies are named as such outright (“The Picasso Elegy” and “A Farewell Elegy”), while many other poems demonstrate an elegiac tonality. However, the lyrical “I” in Natalka’s poetry is not outsized as it can be among some poets, but it is just as modest as she is in real life. Her lyrical “I” is not a projection of herself outward as much as it is an introspective view of her own soul in relation to the world around her. The qualities and quality of her poetry have made her a living classic in Ukraine and worthy of a larger audience beyond its borders, which this collection serves to reach.

– Michael M. Naydan Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies The Pennsylvania State University

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FROM THE COLLECTION SUBTERRANEAN FIRE (1984)

KALYNA

Drawn through lingering trails of smoke we moved, swallowing cosmic dust over a field of stars – the fires of autumn stubble – I with the one I loved more than breath, we pressed on, my beloved and I, not returning.

Gradually, our steps quickened to keep pace among the constellations –turning! Turning! A circling! And desolate, distant earth, a planet like a bird, waves like wings flapping ceaselessly upon the continents.

Already a century had flown since we passed this way in winter. We had forgotten the tenderness and sorrow of human language, and tears and laughter – only the bodiless lightness of our steps and apparition of our hands, their insubstantial touch, persist.

Then suddenly the image, a cluster of kalyna berries, two clusters! Three! Yet how the memory aches, how those little white roots become entwined –my dove, my swallow, my hawk, my dear steppe and Dnipro, its hills, its tender waves!

– Leaves, leaves, leaves . . .

It was then, the first time in a hundred years, I remembered the word – the word brother: “My brother, why are the leaves adrift on the wind, each leaf its drops of blood? No, I thought –

these are little berries! An open poppy, the omen!” And he glanced at me and said: Kalyna.

– Translated by James Brasfield with Lada Kolomiyets

[The Kalyna, viburnum opulus, a deciduous shrub, a national symbol of Ukraine, appears throughout Ukrainian folklore in songs, paintings, and as embroidery on clothes and towels. Rooted in Slavic pagan legend, the Kalyna’s white globular, “snowball” blossoms of early summer represent the beauty of a young woman, its red berries symbolizing blood and family origins – the Kalyna’s origin linked to the birth of the universe, a fire trinity of sun, moon, and stars. (Translators’s note)]

KALYNA

Swallowing dense cosmic smoke we walked in a celestial field – with him whom I loved more than life itself. Chaff burned in the sky as we plodded through a river of smoke – my beloved and I –there was no turning back.

Slowly, with hastened steps we flowed into a passageway of stars –Whirls! Whirls! A spiral! Emptiness! The earth – a globe, the globe – a bird, wings fluttering on continents, incessantly, like oceans.

A hundred years have passed since winter when we died. We have forgotten the caresses and the pain of human words. We have forgotten tears and laughter –there’s only lightness – unembodied feet and faint ethereal hands.

Then suddenly – a flame. A whole cluster of fires! Two clusters! Three! Like distant memories entwined with fine white roots! My little dove, my swallow – a mountain! My falcon, and my steppe! The Dnipro’s gentle wave! – and leaves, leaves, leaves...

Then, for the first time in a hundred years I remembered a word – the word for “brother:” “Tell me, my brother, why do the leaves flow? And on each leaf – droplets of blood! No, it is not so –

They’re berries! Lips! Poppies in bloom! A sign! He looked and said: “Kalyna.”

– Translated by Myroslava Stefaniuk