Contours of the City E-Book

Attyla Mohylny

• Herausgeber: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 108

Beschreibung

Contours of the City arguably comprises one of the finest collections of free verse ever written in Ukrainian even though it was largely overlooked when it first appeared during the political transition to Ukrainian independence in 1991. It certainly deserves a broader audience both in Mohylny’s homeland as well as in the wider world. While it may be described as a one-hit wonder because of the poet’s premature death, it remains a brilliant hit for all time.

Translator Michael Naydan received the Eugene Kayden Meritorious Achievement Award in Translation from the University of Colorado for a partial manuscript of his translations of Mohylny’s poetry into English in 1993. This edition includes a complete translation of Mohylny’s collection Contours of the City along with several poems translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.

Leseprobe

Contours of the City

Attyla Mohylny

Contours of the City

by Attyla Mohylny

Translated from Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan

With Translations of Five Poems by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

Guest Introduction by Ivan Malkovych

Translator’s introduction by Michael M. Naydan

Michael Naydan’s Translations Edited by Larysa Bobrova

Book cover and interior layout by Max Mendor

© 2017, Michael M. Naydan

Cover Art © 2017, Max Mendor

© 2017, Glagoslav Publications B.V.

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-91141-459-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATORS

A DYNASTIC KYIVAN POET

CONTOURS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE POETRY OF ATTYLA MOHYLNY

CONTOURS OF THE CITY

Neighborhoods…

I. A SHIELD MADE OF STEEL

1. BLACK LAKES

2. A SCORCHING NOON

3. RANDOM MOVEMENT

4. THE BEATLES

5. FLEETING RECOLLECTIONS

6. NIGHT MELODIES

7. A STORMY SEASON

8. THE CATHEDRAL

II. BENEATH THE BRIGHT SUN

9. SONG TO THE SUN

10. ARIAS

11. FAR AWAY

12. AN ADVENTURE

13. THE SHIPSAILING SONG

14. THE MIDDLE AGES

15. A CARAVAN

III. EVENINGS. TWILIGHT. IMPRESSIONS.

16. PRELUDE

17. JOURNEYS

18. A GOLD-BEARING SONNET

19. IN THE SOUTH

20. A MAGIC ACT

21. THE LAST APPRENTICE OF MAGISTER KNECHT

22. BATTLE

23. THE MIRAGE

24. IMPROVISATION

25. SPANISH MELODIES

26. JOAN OF ARC

27. THE SEASONS ON ST. ANDREW’S DESCENT

28. THE WINTER OF OUR CITY

29. THE END OF A GLOOMY DAY

30. CIRCULATION

31. SAVE OUR SOUL

32. A REALLY BRIGHT DAWN

33. IN A GALLOP BENEATH THE MOON

34. DIAPHANOUS MORNING

35. A RENAISSANCE

36. COFFEE HOUSES

37. THE ARCHIPENKO SCULPTURE

38. REVERIES

39. MINIATURE SKETCHES

IV. OTHER POEMS

40. MY BLONDE

41. AN EVENING IN THE FOOTHILLS

V. TRANSLATIONS BY VIRLANA TKACZ AND WANDA PHIPPS

42. BLOND

43. A BRIDGE CROSSES THE POND

44. FLYING SOUTH THROUGH THE NIGHT

45. BEATLES

46. SPONTANEOUS MOTION

Thank you for purchasing this book

Glagoslav Publications Catalogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following translations have previously been published: the cycle “Night Melodies” in AGNI 38, “Archipenko’s Plasticity” (retitled here as “The Archipenko Sculpture”) in the spring 1994 issue of Denver Quarterly. A partial manuscript of my translations of Mohylny’s poetry was awarded the Eugene Kayden Meritorious Achievement Award in Translation from the University of Colorado in 1993. Extra special thanks to Larysa Bobrova for taking the time to go over my translations in meticulous detail and for improving them with her suggestions and corrections. I’m also grateful to Vasyl Byalyk for his excellent suggestions on the translation of the poem “My Blonde” as well as on my translation of Ivan Malkovych’s guest introduction. Special thanks to Alla Perminova for her suggestions for emendations to the poem “An Evening in the Foothills.”

Virlana Tkacz’s and Wanda Phipps’ translation of “Flying South through the Night” appeared in the literary journal Beacons: A Magazine of Literary Translations (1995) and the cycle “Beatles” appeared first in AGNI 36 (Fall 1992) and later in A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry. Olha Luchuk and Michael M. Naydan, eds. Lviv: Litopys Press, 2000. All of the Tkacz/Phipps translations of Mohylny also appeared in In a Different Light: A Bilingual Anthology of Ukrainian Literature Translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps as Performed by Yara Arts Group. Olha Luchuk, ed. Lviv: Sribne Slovo, 2008. 

Ivan Malkovych’s essay “Dinastychnyi ukrains’kyi poet” (A Dynastic Ukrainian Poet) first appeared in Ukrainian in Attyla Mohylny, Kyivski kontury. Kyiv: AB-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA, 2013. Part of Michael Naydan’s introductory essay to this volume first appeared in Ukrainian in the journal Suchasnist in the July 1993 issue under the title “Dvoie ukrains’kykh poetiv: Oksana Zabuzhko i Attyla Mohyl’nyi” (Two Ukrainian Poets: Oksana Zabuzhko and Attyla Mohylny).

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATORS

MICHAEL NAYDAN is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and translator, co-translator and/or editor of 40 books of translations from Ukrainian and Russian, more than 40 articles, and over 80 publications of translations in literary journals and anthologies.

VIRLANA TKACZand WANDA PHIPPS 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.

WANDA PHIPPS is the author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX[books]) and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press). She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines and numerous anthologies.

VIRLANA TKACZ heads the Yara Arts Group and has directed thirty original shows at La MaMa Theatre in New York, as well as in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar and Ulan Ude. She received an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for her translations with Wanda of Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry. www.brama.com/yara

LARYSA BOBROVA is a translation studies specialist, who served as Chair of the Translation Studies Department at the Horlivka Institute for Foreign Languages in Ukraine before coming to the US. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from The Pennsylvania State University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, Oxford, OH where she teaches courses in ESL and in linguistics. Her main areas of research include cognitive semantics, conceptual metaphor, and second language acquisition.

A DYNASTIC KYIVAN POET

Attyla Mohylny happened to transverse his creative path in a cloak of invisibility common for a Ukrainian artist. There are very few articles about his books and very little mention of him in the press. Fortunately, over the past two or three years in conversations with several Americans interested in Ukrainian poetry Attyla’s name suddenly and consistently has been uttered in ecstatic reveries about English translations of his poems that were marvelously congruent with a Western sensibility. This is not surprising because Attyla is a poet of Ukraine’s largest megalopolis, and in his poetry there are numerous images and feelings that in one way or another are compatible with those of American beatniks. Toward the end of his life Attyla even acquired the real appearance of a beatnik, but not as a result of some kind of scandalous behavior, but rather just because something had gone wrong in his life.

However, in his poetry—with bright platoons of horseback riders, with solemn princely military drills, and the Polovtsian eyes of waitresses in Kyiv’s cafes—I primarily feel an involuntary echo of the poets Yuri Darahan and Olexander Olzhych. And, of course, the early poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych, but somehow a very Kyivan Antonych. In Attyla’s last poetry there is poignant Mandelstamian despair... Kyiv in Attyla’s poetry becomes a full-blooded Ukraine-centered Mecca. The language of his poems is precise, noble, decisive, impetuous. Ukrainian princes would have spoken this way when, once setting off for dangerous military or hunting exercises, they might unexpectedly have appeared in modern-day Kyiv.

Attyla Mohylny was born September 16, 1963 in Kyiv and died September 3, 2008 in the city he loved and called home his entire abbreviated life. He was one of the most talented of the “Eightiers” generation of writers and one of the very few dynastic poets of Kyiv. His father—the poet Viktor Mohylny—is better known to the wider community as the great children’s poet Vit Vitko.

Attyla graduated from the philological faculty of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University. For some time he taught there and taught as well in the Ukrainian studies program at the University of Warsaw. He studied Persian language and culture at the University of Tadjikistan, worked in television, in the Mohyla Academy Collegium, and as an editor for the newspaper Voice of Ukraine.

He is the author of two collections of poetry: Tumbler Pigeons over the Rooftops (1987) and The Outlines of the City (1991). He is also the author of the original children’s book Mavka and the Ant Prince (1988, 2006).

We were classmates and close friends in school. For two years we even shared an apartment together. Attyla was a native of Kyiv, but his Hungarian mother’s blood probably added to his character a special “tzimmes” that demanded absolute freedom.

We met each other first at our entrance exams to the university. Attyla distinguished me from among the other applicants by my “Angela Davis” hair and a scar on my hand. With his zealous poetic imagination he somehow treated me like a young Don Juan gypsy poet. This, in fact, clearly was characteristic of his worldview. Attylka (as we called him by the diminutive form of his name) loved creating romantic myths.

We often read the same books, and in our shared apartment listened to the same music—from the Beatles to classical symphonies. A third classmate, the poet Ihor Malenky, joined us there. It was as if we formed a kind of trio—three “M’s.” We managed to save a copy of our jointly penned “triad” poem, written under the pseudonym of Ivan Troyan. We wrote it during student military prep classes and called it “Guidelines for Cleaning Weapons and Shoes”:

Don’t clean your shoes like a rifle for shooting

because right when you move beyond all the rivers

in the early morning— drums lie there

with drumsticks stuck into the ground

they’ll quietly count all who have fallen

monotonically like dust on sandals...

In 1983 we were on summer student training at a young pioneer camp at the seaside near Gelendzhik not far from Novorossisk, where the vast majority of children—descendants of Kuban Cossacks—spoke to each other mainly in Ukrainian. On this comforting occasion Attylka and I (it was actually his idea) introduced Ukrainian commands in our detachments. “Platoon! Straighten up! Attention!” Along with a few other commands. This sounded especially stirring coming from the lips of a boy from Moscow, whom we specifically chose as head of the unit. But then someone snitched on us and our “military Ukrainization” on the territory occupied by our “brother Slavs” was harshly abbreviated....

We, of course, read our just written poems to each other. We praised or criticized each other’s work, seasoning everything with a dose of constant irony. To his last days Attyla liked to jot down poems on cigarette packs and matchbooks. Attyla’s character was reserved and quite secretive rather than open. Once he brought home some hand-rolled cigarettes filled with marijuana, but it, fortunately, had no effect on me. Attylka toyed with this new hobby just for a day or two—poetry became “ingrained” inside him a hundred times stronger.

In addition to poetry, Attylka was crazy over the opposite sex. He could fall in love at half a glance (but usually not for very long). Without an inkling of remorse he could go after some other guy’s girlfriend. He once visited me in Bereziv, where later in our house (this was during the dark times of the USSR), we secretly baptized his young poet wife (I was the “godmother’s” godfather). And before that his only children’s tale was “baptized”—while working in the Veselka children’s publishing house I urged Attylka to write a children’s book (that’s when his “Mavka and the Ant Prince” was published in an edition of nearly two hundred thousand copies). Much later, two years before he passed away, I managed to reissue a revised version of “Mavka...” in my A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA Publishing House. Over the last ten to twelve years of his earthly journey Attyla dropped by several times a week at my A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA office in downtown Kyiv for a coffee and a smoke....

I’ve long loved his poems and know several by heart. I’ve even read them in the Union of Writers author’s evenings at the end of the late nineties at the extremely rare during his lifetime. I sincerely consider this restless (and currently still quite underappreciated) Kyiv wanderer one of the most interesting and most identifiable Ukrainian poets of the end of the second millennium. I have a secret hope that, like the poets Bohdan Ihor Antonych or Mykhail Semenko, interest in Attyla’s poetry will be sparked among a young readership.

For a better understanding of the environment in which Attyla grew, I’ll give a brief sketch of his father—Viktor Mohylny, a talented poet in his own right and a prominent Ukrainian philatelist. The author of the essay is Vasyl Ovsiyenko:

“In the early 1960s, after decades of anti-Ukrainian pogroms, informed Ukrainians in Kyiv felt humiliated, estranged. Probably there were very few informed Ukrainian families—on those islands of independence. One of them was the Mohylny family—Viktor and his wife Aurelia (who was Hungarian and from the Western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod and who became a Ukrainian patriot).