The Selected Lyric Poetry Of Maksym Rylsky E-Book

Maksym Rylsky

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

Seitenzahl: 101

Beschreibung

Maksym Rylsky (1895-1964) is one of the most outstanding Ukrainian poets of the the 20th century and master of the genres of the modern sonnet and the long narrative poem. He was closely associated with the Neoclassicist group of Ukrainian poets, who employed traditional poetic forms with rhyme and meter, wrote in a clear and accessible contemporary idiom, and often referenced Ancient Greek and Roman mythology as well as numerous other authors from world literature in their poetry. Rylsky was also a prolific translator from English, French, German, and Polish as well as a folklore and literary scholar, who worked most of the earlier part of his life as a teacher of philology.

He published his first book of poetry at the precocious age of fifteen—On White Islands in 1910. His other early books of poetry include The Edge of the Forest: Idylls (1918), Under Autumn Stars (1918), The Blue Distance (1922), Long Poems (1924), Through a Storm and Snow (1925), Beneath Autumn Stars (1926), Thirteenth Spring (1926), Where Roads Meet (1929), and Echo and Re-echo (1929). Rylsky gained considerable popularity among the Ukrainian reading public for his neo-romantic contemplative musings and intimate lyrical poetry that focused on love, life and nature. While his poetry was completely apolitical, at the end of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance in the 1920s that was crushed by Stalin, Rylsky was sternly rebuked in the state-controlled press for focusing on the personal and not writing in service to the state. In 1931 the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, arrested and publicly humiliated him. He was released in 1932 after he agreed to write in the style of socialist realism and was one of the few prominent Ukrainian writers to survive the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

During the wartime period he wrote two masterful long poems that deviated from socialist realism—“Thirst” (1942) and “Journey to Youth” (1941-4), for which he was again publicly chastised. In 1942 he became Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore and Ethnography in Kyiv, a post that he held until his death in 1964. The Institute now bears his name. He published some 30 collections of original poetry during his lifetime as well as numerous translations and scholarly works. By 1974 almost five million copies of his works in the original or in translation had appeared in the USSR. In his last two books—In the Shadow of the Lark (1961) and Winter Notes (1964) published during The Thaw, a period of relaxed censorship during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, Rylsky’s poetic voice returned to the stature of his early poetry. This selected works edition includes poetry from virtually all of Rylsky’s early collections of poetry, with selection primarily based on esthetic principles; the powerful long poem “Thirst,” penned during the darkest days of World War II for Ukraine; and other poems from various periods of his life.

Translated by Michael M. Naydan.

With a guest introduction by Maria Zubrytska

Leseprobe

The Selected Lyric Poetry Of Maksym Rylsky

Maksym Rylsky

The Selected Lyric Poetry Of Maksym Rylsky

by Maksym Rylsky

Translated by Michael M. Naydan

With a guest introduction by Maria Zubrytska

Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor

© 2017, Michael M. Naydan

© 2017, Glagoslav Publications

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 9781911414438 (Ebook)

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.

My translations of Rylsky first appeared in a bilingual edition Autumn Stars: Selected Poetry of Maksym Rylsky, which was published by Litopys Publishers in 2008. My gratitude to Mykhailo Komarnytsky of Litopys for the care he gave in preparing that volume for publication. Many thanks also to the Lviv artist Jurij Koch for the imaginative cover he did for that bilingual edition. I am grateful to Maria Zubrytska for her thorough comparison of my translations to Rylsky’s originals in early drafts of many of these translations. They are considerably improved as a result of her expertise. I also have a large debt of gratitude to Myroslava Prykhoda for taking the time to go over sticky problems in the final version of the first edition of the translations with me. This new edition contains a number of emendations from that earlier version. Any errors or omissions, of course, are mine.

This edition is dedicated to

Alex and Helen Woskob

Contents

BETWEEN THE LYRIC AND IDEOLOGY: THE DUALITY OF MAKSYM RYLSKY’S POETIC WORLD

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

I. ON WHITE ISLANDS (1910)

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT

As the pink evening descends onto the earth…

ON WHITE ISLANDS

II. BENEATH THE AUTUMN STARS, I (1918)

I wait for a word from you…

These apples have ripened so prematurely…

THE LAST

Who painted broad-leafed chestnut trees…

In solitude I leaf through…

Ridiculed by myself…

I don’t know whether it’s love or not…

Lights. A rowdy evening...

THE VOICE OF POISON

A WINTRY PANE

TO MY LEONORA

Like a kiss through a veil…

Shadows are shifting along the valley…

The café is empty. The minions are murmuring…

In a deep remote spot…

How sweet it is in midnight silence…

Love nature not like a symbol

III. BENEATH THE AUTUMN STARS, II (1926)

Dew has settled onto the white buckwheat

Summer stopped on the doorstep…

Snow fell silently and evenly…

In the spring we used to ride to the field…

The field blackens... Clouds pass…

The lilacs are blooming, the orchard turning white…

Like Odysseus, wearied by wandering…

The apples ripened, the apples are red…

The rain has ended. The azure is clearing…

There is a name, a woman’s, soft and clear…

BLACK ROSES

MUSIC

Outside the walls the cold night is blowing…

It is not the clear-eyed image of Beatrice…

Frost! You are the soul of a Parnassian singer…

From your voice it’s fragrant and wafts

When everything in life’s haze…

Green shadows flashed along your soul…

Eternity writes its unfinished folio…

Let the cold, web-footed snow fall…

The tomatoes are already turning red…

IV. THE BLUE DISTANCE (1922)

THE BLUE DISTANCE

SILENCE

In the mountains among the stone and snows…

SONNET OF BOREDOM AND HOPE

THE PHANTASMAGORIC BRIG

A veranda, grapes, the humming of bees in white…

Once again the road and splashes under the wheels…

An unknown guest…

Tristan saddles his horse…

Once again I am riding on a wood-slat cart…

SAPPHO TO APHRODITE

NIETSCHE

HEINE

SHAKESPEARE

BAUDELAIRE

Fragrant roses adorned our wedding bed…

In the warm days of grape harvesting…

V. THE THIRTEENTH SPRING (1926)

In thickets where you find only the paths of animals...

The hoofprints have been covered in gray smoke…

To circle in the golden air…

I will never forget you…

For the entire day shacked in cauldrons…

THE WINDOWS SPEAK

VI. THROUGH A STORM AND SNOW (1925)

RAIN

In the moldy and sour everyday…

Autumn began to smell of withered tobacco…

Again the same Sphinx, waiting again for riddles…

You walked on a bridge…

Winter lay down. Covering the roads…

This new age Mykula will give the earth...

VII. WHERE ROADS MEET (1929)

Some build temples for the gods...

HUMANITY

THE POPLAR

THE KISS

VIII. THE SOUND AND ECHO (1929)

Flocks run, horses neigh, a heavy bull…

DROUGHT

THE BEGINNING OF A LEGEND

IX. PUBLISHED OUTSIDE OF COLLECTIONS

The city shines in lights…

A VILLAGE SONNET

THE FLYING BOAT

TO MYKOLA ZEROV

Monotonous days pass...

PROMETHEUS

MEDITATION

A BEAM OF LIGHT

THE SCARLET EVENING BURNS LOW

X. THIRST (1942)

THIRST

THE FIRST VOICE

THE SECOND VOICE

THE THIRD VOICE

FIRST SILHOUETTE

SECOND SILHOUETTE

SILHOUETTES

A VOICE

BREATH OF THE STORM

A FAIRY TALE

THE DREAM OR NOT A DREAM

BETWEEN THE LYRIC AND IDEOLOGY: THE DUALITY OF MAKSYM RYLSKY’S POETIC WORLD

There is a poem by Verlaine

in which the poet asks himself

in bitter remorse: “What have you,

a reckless man, done with your life?”

Maksym Rylsky

In the history of Ukrainian literature Maksym Rylsky’s creative oeuvre comprises an illustrative example of political violence versus poetic talent, when under coercive circumstances the poet’s vision of the world breaks up in two: into a lyrical perception of the world on one hand and into an ideological one on the other. The best proof of this dichotomy or split of the dimension of Maksym Rylsky’s creative imagination may be the structural and semiotic cartography not solely of all his works, but of the titles of all his thirty-five collections of poetry published during his lifetime as well. The very number of his collections of poetry alone indicates a certain obsession with the ardent zeal of the poet to adhere to his principle of compensation or a symmetric balancing of coerced ideological involvement with the unconstrained vital force of the lyrical word no matter what. In this respect Maksym Rylsky is indeed the most paradoxical Ukrainian poet, whose answer to political violence was a lyric explosion, whose mission apparently was escape from his ultimate failure both as a Person and as a Poet.

The early poetry collections of Maksym Rylsky are characterized by a neo-romanticism that flows into Symbolist poetics, which captivated the poet under the influence of the French Symbolists Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Verlaine as well as the Russian Symbolists Blok and Annensky. The poet supplemented his neo-romantic and Symbolist predilections with his fascination with folk songs as well as with his interest in the principles of musical organization of poetic texts. For this reason, his sonnets and octaves have the feel of songs. In his subsequent collections Maksym Rylsky prefers classical poetic forms: the tercet (terza rima), the octave and sonnet, and different metric feet from the hexameter and iamb to vers libre appear in his poetry. Owing to such a wide range of different styles and poetics in the texts of Maksym Rylsky, the Ukrainian word acquired a new resonance. Already in 1925 Mykola Zerov, one of the most interesting Ukrainian theoreticians of literature and Neoclassicist poets, underscored the dominance of the features of the Neoclassicist style in the poet’s oeuvre of that time. In particular, Mykola Zerov emphasized the equilibrium and clarity of form, exceptional melodiousness, the combination of ingenuousness with elegance along with an aphoristic nature. This prominent literary theoretician underscores the refinement and at the same time sophistication of the architectonics of the poet’s lyric texts, his natural simplicity in the creation of poetic images-reincarnations, including self-metamorphosis and self-transformation (Zerov, Mykola. Literaturnyi shliakh Maksyma Ryl’s’koho: Tvory v 2-kh tomakh, II (Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1990)). This observation is particularly important for the understanding of the radical self-metamorphoses in Maksym Rylsky’s oeuvre under the ideological tension of the repressive Stalinist regime.

Maksym Rylsky as a lover of life, who observed the beauty of nature with enchanted eyes and who, with a pure and almost childlike rapture celebrated it in his poetic images, rich in associations and personifications, managed in his early poetic oeuvre to grant the status of event to the most prosaic of things, and to transform the most ordinary scene into an artistic poetic canvas that fascinates the eye and ear. The synthesis of his color palette, the phonetic melodiousness of polyphonic sound, and the ability to evoke tactile sensation in the reader comprise the most characteristic features of Maksym Rylsky’s poetic masterpieces. His creative work is abundant with examples of this artistic synthesis; the motifs of the autumnal garden with ripe apples (“These apples ripened so prematurely,” “The apples ripened, the apples are red”) and the subtle poetization of the image of grapes and roses deserve particular attention. In Maksym Rylsky’s poetic garden “real” becomes “abstract” and becomes elevated to the highest form of aesthetization and vice versa. The notion of beauty is always deeply rooted in the the hard work ethic involved in tending a garden well:

He cherishes his little garden as he would cherish a child

He talks to it with tenderness every day;

He digs around and ties up raspberry branches,

He cuts dead branches off cherry trees.

or the extended metaphorization of the image of language as a grapevine:

Cherish your language,

A you would cherish a sprout of the vine;

Weed your garden

Carefully and diligently.

Let language be

Purer than a tear…

Perhaps the poet consciously chooses this very poetization of the natural connection between the meaning of the Latin word “cultura” (to cultivate) and its modern meaning as a stage of human civilization established by the algorithms of human behavior and by the symbolic structures that make this behavior meaningful and significant. In the poet’s artistic presentation this formula of transformation of the “culture” concept has a masterfully unsophisticated metaphorical articulation:

Human happiness has two wings:

Roses and grapes – both beautiful and useful

In this context we should underscore the polysemantic symbol of grapes with their rich variational component, which, in Maksym Rylsky’s creative imagination, has the very significant connotation of "usefulness – sacrifice," which, at the same time, is characteristic of the poet’s oeuvre. The frequent characterization of the symbolic image of grapes in the poet’s creative oeuvre, the dynamics of its modification from one collection of poetry to another, gives us grounds to assume that this image occupies a very privileged place in the axes of Maksym Rylsky’s poetic thinking. Beginning with his early collections of poetry, grape symbolism as well as the symbol of the rose or blooming garden is predominant in world baroque poetry in general and in Ukrainian poetry in particular; suffice to mention The Garden of Divine Songs by Skovoroda. Mykola Zerov was the first to comment on Rylsky’s predilection for neobaroque forms, for its syntax and symbolism, along with the distinctive neoromantic and Symbolist aspirations of the poet: “first he will flow in the poetic lines with a capricious stream of the nearly colloquial syntax of Mickiewicz (‘The Boat,’) then he will take a motif of Franko and decore and debaroque the strict architectonics of its monumental masses beyond recognition”) (“Wanderers”) (Ibid., 561.).

The cartography of Maksym Rylsky’s poetry collections clearly demarcates the lines between exclusively lyric titles and ideologically engaged or conditionally neutral titles. Let us take for example the poet’s early collections of poetry such as On White Islands (1910), Under Autumn Stars (1918), The Blue Distance (1922), Poems (1925), Through a Storm and Snow (1925), The Thirteenth Spring (1926), the titles of which reflect the neoromantic and Symbolist disposition and aspirations of the poet. Such poetry collections as The Sound and Echo (1929) and Where Roads Meet (1929), which were called Maksym Rylsky’s “poetic death” by Jurij Lavrinenko), can be considered the beginning of the transformation of the poet’s conception of the world (Lavrinenko, Jurij. Liryka i lirychnyi epos Maksyma Ryl’s’koho, Vol. 2 (Kyiv: Ukrains’ke slovo, 1994): 94.).