“A Note on the Poet” by Michael M. Naydan

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).

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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 which

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.

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