ABOUT THIS BOOK

Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) is not as well-known as Slavic modernist poets Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, or their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, but he unquestionably should be. Sometimes compared to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, Antonych, who described himself as “an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring,” created during his brief lifetime powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. Born in the Lemko region of Poland, Antonych adopted Ukrainian as his literary language when he moved to Lviv, and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape. This essential collection introduces Antonych’s work to new audiences, and includes a biographical sketch by the translator and a comprehensive introduction by Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world’s leading experts on this remarkable poet.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

BOHDAN IHOR ANTONYCH (1909-37) was an early twentieth-century Lemko-Ukrainian poet. He received a degree in Slavic studies at Lviv University and published five books of poetry before his untimely death at age 28.

MICHAEL M. NAYDAN is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University in State College. He is the translator or co-translator of over 40 books, including Zelensky: A Biography, with Alla Perminova.

LIDIA STEFANOWSKA is a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of Warsaw in Poland. She is the author of Antonych, Antynomii [Antonych, Antinomies], a deep analysis of Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s work.

REVIEWS

"Between Arcadia and catastrophe—this is where the Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych fearlessly searched for the truth, 'the primeval word' that shapes the work of the most original literary explorers. Though his life was cut short in 1937, before he had reached the age of thirty, he produced a number of memorable poems, all of which live on in the musically rich translations of Michael Naydan. Longing to transcend his dark moment in history, Antonych was determined to find his 'home beyond a star,' in poems that reflect what he learned from translating Rilke, reading Whitman and Czeslaw Milosz, and imagining how 'the night heals everyone forever.' His ecstasies and elegies are indeed essential reading."— Christopher Merrill, author of On the Road to Lviv

“In Ukraine, Antonych was and remains something akin to a poetic cult figure, first and foremost among younger poets. The striking innovativeness of his poetic mode of thinking has profoundly shaped the creative expressiveness of succeeding generations, including the most recent.”— Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukrainian poet, novelist, and essayist

“These translations bring us the intimate and ecstatic visions of a young poet as he steps onto the world stage. Through an archetypal animation of nature, where ‘woodpeckers strike green sparks from the trees,’ we follow Antonych, ‘a pagan in love with life,’ in search of ‘the primal word’—‘fire, a god, a bird, or a storm’—and by his exuberance, between ‘human fear and rapture,’ we are lead through his visionary journey, where ‘Sleepwalkers sing on the roofs, / landscapes turn silver, / walls in rooms rustle like the forest, / and the dead moon, the blue moon / opens five gates of night / above a black and glimmering city.’ These are magical poems."— James Brasfield, translator of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha

“[Antonych’s] poems . . . deserve to be read alongside the work of his great contemporaries, such as Lorca and Mandelstam. It’s there that the poet’s metaphoric power comes fully into its own. Michael Naydan has done a major service in carrying over Antonych's dense, syntactically supple verse into English.”— Askold Melnyczuk, poet, novelist, and professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston

" . . . as far as Naydan's selection is concerned, The Essential Poetry is truly excellent and leaves almost nothing to be desired . . . a praiseworthy and important step in the process of introducing this major Ukrainian poet (still largely unknown in the West) to readers and scholars in the English-language world."— Journal of Ukrainian Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
A Note on the Translation
MICHAEL M. NAYDAN
A Biographical Sketch of the Poet
MICHAEL M. NAYDAN
Between Creation and the Apocalypse: The Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych
LIDIA STEFANOWSKA

Part I: From the Collection
The Grand Harmony (1932–1933)
Musica Noctis
De Morte I
Ars Poetica II, 1
Liber Peregrinorum 3

Part II: From the Collection
Three Rings: Long Poems and Lyrics (1934)
Self-Portrait
Three Rings
An Elegy about a Singing Door
An Elegy about the Keys to Love
An Elegy about the Ring of a Song
The Wedding
The Country Tavern
To the Wind
A Landscape from a Window
Goblets
A Prince
Maples
The Village
Christmas
Kolyada
The Green Gospel
Primordial Summer
The Snake
The Forest
An Elegy on the Ring of Night
The Night
A Late Hour
Morning
The Arrow
Bitter Wine
A Bitter Night
A Night on St. George’s Square

Part III: From the Collection
The Book of the Lion (1936)
The Sign of the Lion
Daniel in the Lion’s Den
Ballad about the Prophet Jonah
A Song about the Light before Time
The Samaritan Woman by the Well
Six Strophes of Mysticism
Roses
Carnations
Peonies
Tulips
Violets
A Monumental Landscape
The Square of Angels
Apocalypse
Starlion; or The Constellation of the Lion
Magicopolis; or How Myths are Born
Sands
The Round Dance
A Song on the Indestructibility of Matter
A Prayer to the Stars
Red Taffeta
The Tale of a Black Regiment

Part IV: From the Collection
The Green Gospel (1938)
FIRST CHAPTER
An Invitation
To the Beings from a Green Star
An Ecstatic Eight-Strophe Poem
FIRST LYRIC INTERMEZZO
The First Chapter of the Bible
Two Hearts
A Portrait of a Carpenter
The Fair
SECOND CHAPTER
The Sign of the Oak
Duet
The Garden
SECOND LYRIC INTERMEZZO
A Bird Cherry Poem
A Sermon to the Fish
Carp
Spring
Cherry Trees
THIRD CHAPTER
Goldsea
The Fleece
A Prayer for the Souls of Drowned Girls
Ambassadors of the Night
To a Proud Plant, that is, to Myself
The Lady of Diamonds
The Home beyond a Star

Part V: From the Collection
Rotations (1938)
Rotations
Cities and Muses
Ballad of the Alley
Forever
A Ballad on Azure Death
The Bottom of Silence
The End of the World
The Concert from Mercury
Dead Automobiles
Trumpets of the Last Day
Ending

Part VI: From Poetry not Published in Collections
A Lviv Elegy
Green Faith
A Prayer

Part VII: From the Collection
A Welcome to Life (1931)
The Mad Fish
The Stratosphere
The Bee
Autumn
About a Strophe
Autobiography
A Welcome to Life

General Index
Index of Poem Titles in English
Index of Poem Titles in Latin and Ukranian