TRANSLATIONS FROM UKRAINIAN
by Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko
Ivan Franko. TO THE GRAY-HAIRED
You, brother, love Ukraine,
I don't! Oh, what a shame!
You are a patriot, you’re game
I am the dog to blame.
You, brother, love Ukraine,
Like butter, bread and bacon.
Meanwhile I bark and bark,
To keep her wide awaken.
You, brother, love Ukraine
Because she’s dressed so fancy.
I don’t! Just like a slave,
Who doesn’t love his master.
You love Ukraine. For that
You’re honored and respected,
For me, Ukraine is like
A bloody wound in my heart.
Vasyl Stus. THERE GROWS THE WALL
there grows the wall between the world and soul
play hide and seek so they don't recognize you
through layers of the deadly memories
numb thoughts and ice floes of your senses
the spurs went into such a frozen soul
unwillingness just shortens the desire
for seeking wells, in which endure forever
the world to recognize you and to kill you
with all of its resistless deadly weight
there is the wind that blows souls out of bodies
breaks trees, bends grass along the way and even
creates a multifaceted emptiness
that is exhausted by its own improvement
such sadness everywhere! how many
fates are lost! how many carried on
down to the final breath, the final moan
to death. such sadness everywhere!
where grows the wall between the world and soul
Viktor Neborak. ROOM
I'll have fun tonight
because now I'm sad, she said
the elusive mood of a person
who doesn't love you
And I built this day
like a palace in the air
filled it with caresses and words
Every room would be just us
The room is blue, and
the room is pink, so come in.
look at me that’s how I live
So much I can give you this day
a song would be made of your breath
and people would stop in their tracks
in the middle of spring
I would create like God
You see, I'm all beauty, all majesty
I become a human
She's having fun in the evening
watching a TV program
in her ordinary apartment
in her ordinary beauty
Ihor Kalynets. THE FREE VERSE SENTENCE 18
taking the wind
out of the white sail
like a fish out of a net
removing a
splinter
of unresolved longing
from a stranger's eyes
stealing your beloved
from her dreamless sleep
uprooting
another stump of illusion
from the wild field of the soul
having your ear
to the wall of the day,
like a prison cell
writing a free verse sentence
to myself
three times a day
I make sure
if you are not
a poet's denunciation,
then what are you,
poetry?
Hryhoriy Skovoroda. SONG 20
If one has a pure heart and soul,
He doesn’t need armor
And a helmet over his head.
Nor does he need war.
Purity is his armor,
Innocence is his diamond wall.
God Himself is his shield, sword, and helmet.
This holy city is not afraid of bombs
Nor mocking arrows,
It is not afraid of cunning faces,
Always intact — never catching on fire.
Purity is the diamond,
And innocence is the holy city.
Fly there and rest there!
The enemies are loved in this city,
They do good for their enemies,
They sacrifice strength for others,
They are kind not only to friends.
Where is that wonderful city?
You yourself are the city
once you’ve rid yourself of the poison in your soul,
You’ve became the Holy Spirit's temple.
Yuriy Izdryk. BOSPHORUS
I see the sky and I see the sun and
I touch the flowers, I touch the grass
I don't need more than I have already
I've got as much as I have deserved
it's all that came back, it's all that happened
and what's on top — a trophy for me
I'm leaving all the foreign train stations
I'm staying where I already left off
highways and railroads go through my body
rivers and bridges go through myself
it's a visa free zone right here in my heart
so easily here you settle down
it's now or never, it's your final score
it is my transpersonal Bosporus
your last commandment despite the customs
make love, not war, make love not war
Oksana Zabuzhko. I AM BURNING
I am burning with tenderness —
I am molding your face:
Out of the darkness,
out of the rain that blinds us both,
It appears — pristine as an exhalation:
«I love you».
And, dripping down,
it tickles my fingers.
It's not a kiss anymore —
it's a flight over the roofs and lanterns:
In the night sky, like chaos,
swollen with freedom
Create me from space,
destroy me and create me again.
Through lips that have seen me,
take me into yourself.
I will return on the wings
of your all-knowing hands,
Dazed and strange,
with the tangled smoke of my hair.
So that the cobblestones would crack in envy
when they hear my footsteps,
And through my gaze,
in the middle of the night, morning arrives..
Olena Boryshpolets. DOES YOUR CITY HAVE ENOUGH BIRDS
Does your city have enough birds
everyone has the right to ignore them.
A blind man feels the sun over his head
without any birds’ words.
What is it all about and where have they landed?
those damn birds.
The deaf man notices lost things and bodies
there was a wall here
and it's gone.
Why did we look at
that living rib?
So how many birds live in the city?
Volodymyr Rafieyenko. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (excerpt)
Language is the house of being. This famous expression belongs to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. No matter how we treat him and his ideological preferences, this man was right when he said so. Indeed, language, if it does not form a being, determines a certain range of human perception of this boundless world. What you are able to name, you are certainly able to see. What you can see, you have a chance to understand.
The only thing is that being, if we mean its truly ontological dimension, is much wider than any particular language. The unconditional correlation between being and language does not raise questions. What is questionable is the attempt to cram the entire valuable world, all eternity, and all otherworldliness into the framework of a single language. No matter how beautiful it may be.
It seems that the philosopher when thinking about the house of being meant not a specific language, but the very ability of a person to speak. Language as a form of consciousness, into which sometimes the bitter chocolate of our present is poured, and sometimes its steaming blood. And only if I try to think about it in this register, then there is a chance to understand how it happened in my life that at the end of my fifth decade I changed my mother tongue - Russian for now my second mother tongue - Ukrainian. And why I feel almost no discomfort when I think in Ukrainian when I write books or essays in Ukrainian.
Artem Chekh. A POLONAISE FOR FELIX (excerpt)
Lida had never been afraid of anything. Maybe because she did not watch TV or read the newspapers. Lida would listen to the radio and knit. She would sit in her small cramped room on the bed under a monochrome tapestry (a naked woman on the river bank), knit and of course, listen to the radio.
And also, Lida swam in the Dnipro all year. Almost every day, fearless and hardened by nature, she went to the river, resolutely crossed the long sandy beach covered with islands of ice and mounds of snow, walked out on the frozen surface, looked for an ice hole left by fishermen, took off her clothes, remaining in a faded pink and once red swimsuit, firmly rested her hands on the edges of the hole and dove in. And all this happened year after year, until one February day she didn’t resurface from beneath the ice. For almost a minute Lida could not swim out, an unexpected force carried her away from the ice-hole through the dark waters of the Dnipro, further from the light and closer to death.
Olena Boryshpolets. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (excerpt)
Now I find myself somewhere in the Langeron area, or perhaps the Gold Coast, where we recently welcomed the dawn in a crowd, akin to wild children who have outgrown the lords of the flies. It's a lamentable truth that summer doesn't belong to anyone, not even to us, the seaside idlers who discovered each other in this anesthetic warmth, still savoring the times of Odesa's leisure with the hallmark of southern absoluteness.
Regrettably, the lord of the seasons scattered us to distant corners right after the cherry plum season. I close my eyes, envisioning us gathered around the grill on your terrace, no one eager to claim responsibility for tending to the flame. Eventually, fire and hunger overwhelm us. Everything is at our disposal, even Minotaur meat from the supermarket on Lvivska Street. Someone nudges a glass – I think it's Linnikov or Hayetsky, or perhaps Petrov, but definitely not Lipatov – and it shatters across the yard. The resounding laughter of everyone echoes in the aftermath of this smashing of expensive dishes. Five minutes later, a broom is already rustling in my hand, diligently transforming fragments of beauty into a melodic ring.
Through the wall of the house, I can hear Lukina sighing by the half-empty dish slide. In the morning, she will inquire hopelessly:
"Where's the service, girls? Where is my Czech crystal?" It's a little disheartening to think that you'll never receive my letters because I've chosen not to distract you from life in the capital.