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- Herausgeber: Glagoslav Publications B.V.
- Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
- Sprache: Englisch
An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, often forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or line, to reread a previous word to focus on the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness and permeability mimics much the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written communicative convention of sentences and grammatical structure. This “slipperiness” and rapid shifting of voice comprises one of the essential invariants in Ilchenko’s poetics. The poet also flaunts many traditional poetic Ukrainian conventions. Like ee cummings he tends to avoid capital letters or punctuation such as exclamation points. One will find only commas and dashes for pauses, and an occasional period in his poems, which do not always end with the finality of that punctuation mark. In doing this, the poet often suggests a fragment or slice of his life broken off on the page and to be continued at some point in time. He is a fascinating poet whose idiom and unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English.
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Seitenzahl: 56
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Conversations before Silence
The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko
Oles Ilchenko
Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko
by Oles Ilchenko
Translated by Michael M. Naydan
Guest introduction by Kostyantyn Moskalets
Translations edited by Alla Perminova
Cover and layout by Max Mendor
© 2017, Michael M. Naydan
© 2017, Glagoslav Publications B.V.
www.glagoslav.com
ISBN: 978-1-91141-462-9 (Ebook)
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
A Biographical Note on Oles Ilchenko
Acknowledgements
The Poetry of Oles Ilchenko: Some Observations on a Poet-Traveler
Experiencing the Rapturous Now
I. From the Collection Pages (2004)
“you ask why…”
“in my favorite café…”
“to the barking of dogs of night…”
“When I look at a moth at night…”
“at night you should wander…”
“a shadow…”
“there was a pre-historic time when…”
“the mouth of a drowned man…”
II. From the Collection Cities and Islands (2004)
I. NIGHT STATION
“When the nurse pulls the needle from your vein…”
“One February morning I died and…”
“Three drunkards barefoot...”
“They laid you to rest. It rained that day…”
II. PASSAGE
“slowly…”
“the last crossing…”
“a. my grandfather died in 1969…”
“after all we are born in the same city…”
“it’s worth it…”
III. CITIES AND ISLANDS
III. SEVEN CAPITALS
AMSTERDAM
BERLIN
BRUSSELS
CAIRO
LUXEMBOURG
MADRID
PARIS
IV. SEVEN ISLANDS
GRAN CANARIA
TENERIFE
LANZAROTE
LA GOMERA
LA PALMA
EL HIERO
FUERTEVENTURA
IV. From the collection Conversation before Silence (2005)
V. I. A GREEN BOAT
“hauling bodies through landscapes…”
“I took down my portrait…”
“to find…”
“but then to separate…”
“beneath soft velvet wings…”
“at first foxtail and bluegrass…”
“with the key of memory opening…”
“in the olive-colored water…”
VI. II. TIME IN RIME
“she’s sleeping close by…”
“to enter into the warm alluring sea…”
“when I make love with you…”
“it’s really sweet…”
“we turn out the light…”
“we’re drinking zakarpatsky cognac…”
V. From the collection Certain Dreams, or a Kyiv Which is Not (2007)
“They’re burning fallen leaves in the garden…”
“To draw out some blood—to drink wine…”
“Those crows that live on Reitarska Street…”
“In the dead café…”
“Poured tea, cold coffee…”
“Gulp, drink up. Don’t mention anyone…”
VI. From poems not published in collections
“you sleep capriciously…”
“sedge…”
“an overly intense sense of life…”
“Those colors are gray…”
“the taste of aching in the middle of…”
Thank you for purchasing this book
Glagoslav Publications Catalogue
A Biographical Note on Oles Ilchenko
Ukrainian poet, prose writer, children’s author, culturologist, and filmscript writer Oles Ilchenko was born in Kyiv on October 4, 1957. He has lived in Kyiv for most of his life and traveled extensively to numerous other countries. He has spent the last several years living in Switzerland with his wife. He received degrees from the Drahomaniv Kyiv Pedagogical University and the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. He is the author of twenty-two children’s books, the novels City with Chimeras (2009) and My Beloved Kyara (2011) and a book of memoirs of the 1970s-1990s, Collectors of the Mists: Subjective Notes from a Life in Kyiv (2017). His seven books of poetry include: A Wintry Garden (1991), Constellation AS (1993), A Different Landscape (1997), Pages (2004), Cities and Islands (2004), Conversation before Silence (2005), and Certain Dreams, or A Kyiv which is Not (2007). He also writes film scripts and is the author of numerous articles on cultural issues. His favorite pastimes include traveling to different countries, swimming, and experimenting with the creation of various culinary dishes.
Acknowledgements
My translations of “When the nurse pulls the needle from your vein” and “a. my grandfather died in 1969” appeared first in Zoland Poetry Annual. My translations of the poems “hauling bodies through landscapes,” “I took down my portrait,” and “to find” appeared first in the journal of translation Metamorphoses, and my translations of the poems “slowly…,” “it’s worth it…,” CAIRO, “but then to separate…,” and “in making love with you…” were first published in International Poetry Review. Many thanks to Kost Moskalets for allowing me to translate and publish his fine piece on Ilchenko’s poetry. Much gratitude to Svitlana Budzhak-Jones and Alla Perminova for their extremely helpful comments on the translation of the introduction. Extra special thanks to Alla Perminova for her perspicacious suggestions for emendations to my translations of the poetry, which serve to make them much better. I, of course, am responsible for any errors that may have slipped through the cracks.
The Poetry of Oles Ilchenko: Some Observations on a Poet-Traveler
I once asked my good friend the poet Viktor Neborak to suggest some interesting newer poets emerging on the literary scene in Ukraine. Viktor, without even taking time to think about it, uttered the name of just one poet to me—Oles Ilchenko from Kyiv. Trusting Viktor’s judgment and his refined literary taste, I jotted down the name in a notepad and went to a bookstore the next day where I found copies of the poet’s books. After perusing and buying them, I dove into them and immediately was impressed by Ilchenko’s poetry, which was profoundly philosophical and personal, as well as spare and direct in terms of its imagery and metaphors. The poet’s voice was assured and steady, and it spoke directly to the reader much in the way that Lina Kostenko’s and Anna Akhmatova’s poetry did. The biggest surprise to me was a Ukrainian poet writing in the natural rhythms of the language without traditional rhyme and meter, the latter of which dominated Ukrainian poetry until the most recent transitional and current younger generation of poets. Ilchenko himself notes some of the possible influences on him in his shift to free verse through his own allusions to William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz in his poems. One would be hard pressed to imagine two better poet “mentors” from the American tradition to aid in the poet’s transition to new poetic forms.
