As National Poetry Month comes to a close, we’re highlighting a newly-released paperback edition of The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies, translated by Michael M. Naydan.
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, available for the first time in paperback, 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.
Here, we speak with translator Michael Naydan about the experience and process of translating Antonych’s work as well as his thoughts on Ukrainian poetry’s historical and current context.
BUP: You note that your translations of Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s poetry carry with them your own interpretations of his work. To what extent and in what ways do you think your translations might add to the conversation within and surrounding Antonych’s work?
Naydan: I would think all translators consider translation an act of interpretation. Antonych is particularly vexing to translate because of his use of inversion and lines that can be interpreted in multiple ways. That puts the onus on the translator to come up with the right solution from those various possibilities since we can’t ask the poet himself. I consulted with Prof. Lidia Stefanowska of the U. of Warsaw on the stickiest of these wickets and always followed her advice. She’s the world’s leading expert on Antonych and wrote a fabulous, must-read introduction to this Antonych volume. There are various elements that drew me to Antonych’s works, particularly their distinctiveness as poetry, the unique nature of his language and metaphors, the philosophical depth of his poems, the metaphysical nature of his writing.
It is always a difficult process to navigate between two polysystems such as Ukrainian and English. While rhymed and metered verse dominated Ukrainian poetry in Antonych’s time, I needed to create a version of Antonych that would be in a natural idiom accessible to Anglophone readers of today. Antonych himself was a self-admitted rule breaker in his poetry. He had his own issues fitting into the demands of traditional verse forms of his time, so he often has an additional or missing syllable for a particular meter, uses odd syntax, has strophes of varying length, and makes use of slant rhymes that sometimes barely rhyme. But that rule-breaking in his poetics is part of what makes him great. I want readers of these English translations to understand the depth of his thought processes, his soul, to get the inherent message of his poetry, to get a good sense of his poetic voice, of who he was as a poet. I also try to use compensatory poetic devices whenever possible to convey some of his unique style. I also do try to recreate the ineffable “sound” of his poetry whenever possible.
BUP: You didn’t choose a comprehensively chronological selection of Antonych’s poetry; beyond seeking to portray a representation of his progression as a poet, what motivated which pieces you picked for translation?
Naydan: I placed his first collection of juvenilia A Welcome to Life (1931) last in this book of translations just because for the most part he was not yet fully mature as a poet in that initial collection. He had not found his true voice yet there. I wanted readers to connect with him immediately by reading some of his better poems first. His early poems often were on mundane topics without the philosophical depth characteristic of his later poetry. He found his articulate voice in his second collection, The Grand Harmony, which was unpublished in his lifetime except for several poems that appeared in print in periodicals. He clearly underwent a deep spiritual crisis while writing that second collection, in which he wrestles with profound philosophical issues such as the meaning of life and its fragility, the nature of God, a human being’s place in the universe vis-à-vis God, all of that with traditional deeply religious underpinnings. He was the son of a Catholic priest and grew up in the Latin Rite tradition, so that was all organic to him. From his 1934 collection Three Rings on until his premature death in 1937 at the age of 27, his extraordinary genius as a poet unfolded. I chose poems to translate primarily for aesthetic reasons, picking ones that connected with me and my own sensibilities as a literary scholar and lifetime aficionado of poetry.
BUP: Do you think the historical context surrounding Antonych is integral to his poetry? or do you see his work as substantial despite differences in time period?
Naydan: Poetry is eternal. The themes are universal. Life, death, love, being, nothingness, consciousness, beauty, the world around us that poets interpret in myriad ways. The universality of his themes transcends a specific time or place, and readers of today can connect with them just as deeply as readers in Antonych’s time did. Readers can appreciate the depth of his soul, his life experiences reflected in the poems, and what it means to be human. It’s important for me to put the Anglophone and Ukrainian audiences in conversation with each other, to show the Western readership the lofty heights of a brilliant Ukrainian poet who deserves recognition in world poetry. He should be regarded in the same breath as his luminary contemporaries from Europe and North America. It is uplifting for Ukrainian readers, many of whom are well acquainted with the Western poetic tradition, to see attention being paid to their culture, which for much of its history has been suppressed by the repressive Russian and Soviet states for purely political reasons. Antonych is a prime example of the lofty heights Ukrainian culture can reach.
BUP: How do you see what Antonych wrote about relating to a modern day audience, given the current war in Ukraine?
Naydan: He was sickly all his brief life, so thoughts of death and human mortality are omnipresent in his works from his childhood on through his writing. In “De Morte I” he writes: “An angel will appear and write / the judgment on azure paper with his sword, / death will come and with a silver key / unlock the door of eternity for me.” This is the mysterious, the elegiac in his poetry. It’s not for nothing that I subtitle this collection of translations “Ecstasies and Elegies.”
Turning to Antonych’s ecstatic side, how can a reader not be uplifted by the lines “I am forever an ecstatic pagan, / a poet of the high of spring” (“Self-Portrait”)? While conscious of his own mortality, he still experiences the highest of highs in life, admiring beauty everywhere. And how can one not be moved by these lines: “For only sudden rapture can uncover essence, / can join us into a mystical union with the world. / A heaven nailed to the cross of the earth sighs / and the stigmata of the sun shine on my palm” (“Six Strophes of Mysticism”). And in “A Song on the Indestructibility of Matter,” he sees himself in the great chain of being from life to death to something beyond: “Thousands of centuries will roll past like lava, / where we once lived, palm trees that have no name will grow, / the charcoal from our bodies will bloom as a black flower, /and pick-axes in a quarry will ring into my heart.”
So, in sum, I see historical context as a complement to understanding his poetry and his creative milieu, but not entirely essential to understanding his verse.
BUP: Given that some of the poems you translated had never appeared in English before, what do you hope both English and Ukrainian language audiences can gain from being placed in the same conversation?
Naydan: In his poetry, Antonych was not political at all, although he felt an impending cataclysm in his apocalyptic poems in his collection Rotations that appeared posthumously in 1938. The Red Army arrived to occupy Lviv in 1939 and the Nazis in 1941, both bringing death and destruction. On a personal level, Antonych supported Ukrainian causes at a time when Lviv and Western Ukraine were under Polish rule. He had the freedom to write in Ukrainian then and willingly chose it as his literary language, when he probably could have written much more easily in his native Polish. Antonych has influenced generations of Ukrainian poets precisely because he followed where his art and heart took him without any political pressure. Very little poetry other than war poetry is being written today in Ukraine, and that is understandable. Many Ukrainian poets are writing essays instead and raising awareness for the cause in what truly is an existential crisis for a nation, a people, and a culture. Every Ukrainian intellectual reads Antonych, because he is a model for true poetic genius. The great geniuses of twentieth-century Ukrainian poetry were Lesya Ukrainka, Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Mykola Bazhan, Lina Kostenko, and Antonych. Antonych will always have a prominent place in that pantheon.
The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies is available to order here in paperback.
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.