Anthologist: Tetiana Terev
Preface: Ostap Slyvynsky
Translator: Eleni Katsioli
*
Lyuba Yakimchuk, Vano Krueger, Myroslav Laiuk, Taras Malkovych, Oksana Maksymchuk, Lyuba Yakimchuk, Vano Krueger, Myroslav Laiuk, Taras Malkovych, Oksana Maksymchuk, Bohdan-Oleg Horobchuk, Olena Huseinova.
Find the book here
It wasn’t long ago that a German poet, who was guest at Lviv International Literature Festival, confessed after his speech: “I now have a dream” he said, “but it will never come true. I wish I was a Ukrainian poet. Because the audience rewards you with so much affection. And it’s such a big audience”.
I believe that Ukrainian poets are jealous of themselves, because they come out for the first time before an audience that is thirsty for poetry and really eager to listen, to become aware, to remember and memorize, to take a selfie with the poets and spray paint the city walls with their favorite poems. All this is true. I also imagine that most poets would feel better if they got a little less attention – not because of fatigue or boredom, it’s just that, as time goes by, they will come to realize that all these come at a price. The political and economic elite of Ukraine is in the throes of crisis, and because of that, it is incapable of putting forward noble messages and overcome the government’s lack of transparency and the enormous absence of stability and security, which leads to a lack of trust from the audience. In cases such as these, a poet’s voice rises in importance. Poets are assigned a very sensitive social task: to fill the void of spiritual and moral authority. Politicians are for the most part compromised and priests are associated with a spiritual order of a different nature – their voice sounds very insular and demanding. The only ones left, therefore, are poets, who speak about human things in a human language, things that are personal and universal and unavoidable at the same time. We could try to explain why in this day and age – in the 28th year of Ukrainian Independence, in the midst of post-communist transformations and the grueling war with Russia, in a period of frenzied searching for collective identity and the ideal form of the Ukrainian political nation – the Ukrainian audience expects its poets to provide this answer, which could take the form of an eloquent human message, a “translation” of vague everyday life, a language of transparent emotion and trust, with words as warm “as handshakes”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Celan. The answer is: because this is the objective of poetry. Thus, Ukrainian Poetry had always assumed – or, perhaps, chose to reassume – the old-fashioned mantle of this mission, or, if you prefer, this burden. Today, in the period after the revolution and the war, Ukrainian poetry goes through its own neoromanticism, despite the fact that, by all appearances, romanticism was just over and done with.
Contemporary Ukrainian poetry may sometimes seem to be overtly emotional, if you view it from a Western perspective, or too plain and lacking in standard ornaments, if seen from an Oriental perspective. Here, however, at the very center, it appears balanced, like a bridge resting on two shores. I cannot imagine how it may look if you view it from the South. Maybe this anthology can answer this particular question!
Undoubtedly, the complicated lacework built out of the sample featured in this anthology evolves out of very particular experiences from the creators’ lives. Some of them, those who live outside Ukraine, have gained the accurate perspective provided by the distance from the motherland; this is the case of Oksana Maksymchuk, who draws her thin intellectual line on the margins of Ukrainian and English-speaking tradition, and Iryna Shuvalova, who searches for common sources with European eroticism by reexamining medieval ballads, the old – as old as the world – archetypal heraldic symbolism and the cards in the tarot deck. On the other hand, there are those whose lives are very close to Ukrainian historical dramas, such as Lyuba Yakimchuk, who was born in Pervomaisk – which currently belongs to the temporarily uncontrolled frontline areas in the east of Ukraine – illustrates, in a dramatic manner, the public gaps that affect even her own family, as well as the gaps in language that make it harder and harder for her to reach a common understanding with relatives and friends. Iryna Tsilyk, whose husband is also a writer and fought on the Russo-Ukrainian front, weaves a stirring canvas of anxiety and expectation.
Les Beley and Julia Stakhivska, who compose a kind of “ecological” poetry, seek the key of modernity in the allegories of plants, the metaphors of our biological inventory, and also in examples of biological cruelty. The delicate, emotionally colored texts of Olena Huseinova and Kateryna Mikhalitsyna serve as the “pink spears” of poetry that bring down the walls of misunderstanding and alienation. The inner-city, hard verses of Bohdan-Oleg Horobchuk and Vano Krueger constitute an emotional representation of the “ego” as it sinks in the beat of the post-informational age: the first is more sensual, the second is more ironic. Myroslav Laiuk makes an experiment in fantasy, playing with language and images, placing pop culture references and folklore motifs on top of archetypal human experiences of growth and initiation. Taras Malkovych, one of the most intellectual poets of this anthology, builds his series of images through the semantic pulse of the language.
There is a great diversity. Above all, however, there is a harmony that echoes in a decisive historical moment, which stands as a strong affirmation of creative freedom and childhood spirit beyond all pretenses. Poets, like sensitive antennas, transmit this alarm, despite the fact that they may seem – as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert once wrote – “always thinking of something else”. Even so, doesn’t thinking “of something else” imply that you are thinking about what’s most important?
Ostap Slyvynsky
Poet, member of the Executive Council of PEN Ukraine