The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak E-Book

Bohdan Rubchak

• Herausgeber: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 175

Beschreibung

Only a handful of prominent émigré Ukrainian poet-scholar Bohdan Rubchak’s poems have appeared in English translation prior to the publication of this volume. Rubchak died in 2018 at the age of 83 after publishing six collections of poetry, the last for which he received the prestigious Pavlo Tychyna Prize in Ukraine in 1993. Rubchak was part of the extremely talented displaced generation that escaped from the traumatic experiences of World War II to find a new life and creative inspiration in a new land. As an integral part of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets, his complex, at times seemingly cryptic poetry, makes the translator’s task imposing.

His poems are filled with meaning on multiple levels – semantic, syntactic, auditory, symbolic, and allusive. The volume, co-translated by Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones, includes selections from all six of Rubchak’s published collections of poetry: The Stone Garden (1956), The Radiant Betrayal (1960), The Girl without a Country (1963), A Personal Clio (1967), Drowning Marena that appeared as part of The Wing of Icarus (1983) selected works volume, and the expanded selected works edition The Wing of Icarus (1991), which was the poet’s only collection of poetry published in Ukraine.

The book also contains an intimate and revealing biographical essay based on the poet’s unpublished diaries by his wife of over fifty years Marian J. Rubchak, illuminating essays on his poetry by Svitlana Budzhak-Jones and Mykola Riabchuk, and a brief biographical essay and timeline by Michael M. Naydan, the editor of the volume.

Leseprobe

The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak

Songs of Love, Songs of Death, Songs of The Moon

Bohdan Rubchak

Glagoslav Publications

The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak:

Songs of Love, Songs of Death, Songs of The Moon

by Bohdan Rubchak

Translated by Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones (with one translation by Liliana M. Naydan) with: a biocritical afterword by Marian J. Rubchak a translator’s afterword by Svitlana Budzhak-Jones an essay on the poet by Mykola Riabchuk

A concise biography and timeline by Michael M. Naydan

Edited by Michael M. Naydan

Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor

© 2020, Michael M. Naydan,

Svitlana Budzhak-Jones, and Liliana M. Naydan

© 2020, Glagoslav Publications

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 9781912894864 (Ebook)

First published in English by Glagoslav Publications in August 31, 2020

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

Preface

from the collection THE STONE GARDEN (1956)

IN A ROOM OF A HUNDRED MIRRORS

AUTUMN

THE LIPS OF LEAVES

THE GRAVES OF MY GREAT GRANDSONS WERE HERE

TO HAMLET

NOCTURNAL MINIATURES

MIDNIGHT IMPROVISATION

ARS POETICA

FROM THE SONG OF SONGS

from the collection THE RADIANT BETRAYAL (1960)

THE RADIANT BETRAYAL

FOR FRANCESCA

FOR FRANCESCA AGAIN

THE ANGEL’S BETRAYAL

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

A RECOLLECTION OF THE MOON

THE WING OF ICARUS

BE SILENT

from the collection TO THE GIRL WITHOUT A COUNTRY (1963)

TO THE GIRL WITHOUT A COUNTRY

AND THEN WE RODE HOME

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT

FROM GOTTFRIED BENN

THE DANCER

SONG OF A WOMAN BENEATH THE MOON

IN THE LAST HOUSE OF THE MIRROR

ABSENCE

THREE EMBLEMS

THE FARNESS OF ROADS

A WINDY ICARUS

A RESTLESS SLEEP

THE DESTINATION

AN AUTUMN DAY

from the collection A PERSONAL CLIO (1967)

AUTUMN ROMANCE

TO CLIO

THREE FRAGMENTS OF “THE WORD”

A STONE

DON JUAN

MOZART

CHOPIN

A SMALL POET

MY ITHACA

A WINTRY ROMANCE

A SONG FOR MARIANA

NOTES FROM A DIARY

DESTINATION

from the collection DROWNING MARENA (1983)

DROWNING MARENA

LETTER TO HOME

A BOOK FROM HOME

DECADENCE

A FLASH AND A REFLECTION

A MANDARIN FOR MY WIFE

THE FEMALE SAINT AND THE DEVIL

SKETCHES

THE GODS

from the collection THE WING OF ICARUS (1983; 1991)

THE BLACKSMITH

RAIN

AN EVENING PRAYER

NARCISSUS

THE HARDEST GAME

DRAMATURGY

COMPRESSIONS

AFTERWORD I: MY LIFE WITH THE POET AND HIS POETRY

AFTERWORD II: THE COMPLEXITY AND PERPLEXITY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK: REMARKS ON TRANSLATING HIS POETRY

AFTERWORD III: THE STIGMATA OF WINGS: ON THE POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK

AFTERWORD IV: BOHDAN RUBCHAK (1935-2018): A CONCISE BIOGRAPHY

AFTERWORD V: TIMELINE OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK (1935-2018)

AFTERWORD VI: PAGE NUMBERS OF PUBLICATIONS WHERE POEMS FIRST APPEARED

Notes

Thank you for purchasing this book

Glagoslav Publications Catalogue

Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been possible without the enormous support and efforts of Marian J. Rubchak, who also goes by Mariana or Mar’iana in Ukrainian, to whom we are exceedingly grateful. She went far beyond the call of duty to promote the legacy of her husband Bohdan Rubchak and devoted an enormous amount of time to explaining biographical connections in his poetry.

The poems “Dramaturgy” and “The Angel’s Betrayal” both first appeared in the poetry anthology A Hundred Years of Youth (Litopys Publishers, 2000). All other translations are appearing here for the first time. Mykola Riabchuk’s essay “The Stigmata of Wings: On the Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak” first appeared in Ukrainian as a preface to Rubchak’s final collection Krylo Ikarove (The Wing of Icarus; Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1991). We are grateful to Alina Zhurbenko for her assistance in the final stages of the project.

Preface

by Michael M. Naydan

Prior to the appearance of this collection only a handful of Bohdan Rubchak’s poems have appeared in English translation. This volume attempts to remedy that situation for a truly outstanding Ukrainian poet in the North American diaspora, Bohdan Rubchak, who died in 2018 at the age of 83. Rubchak was a child of the displaced post-war generation that escaped from the traumas of World War II to find a new life in a new land on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Bohdan, whom I had met on numerous occasions, had a playfully abrasive personality with a biting sense of humor that immediately set him off from the crowd. To compare him to a poet from the English poetry tradition, one whose poetry he knew quite intimately, I would say that he reminds me a bit of the character and poetry of Dylan Thomas with a similarly obsessive raging against the idea of the dying of the light. Bohdan took Thomas’s advice and never went gentle into that good night.

Bohdan’s complex, at times seemingly impenetrable poetry, which makes the translator’s task imposing, is filled with meaning on multiple levels – semantic, syntactic, auditory, symbolic, allusive, and in other innovative ways, which Svitlana Budhak-Jones illuminates in detail in her essay in an afterword to this volume.

It has been a great pleasure for me to work with Svitlana on these English translations to unravel the mysteries of Rubchak’s poetry. She contributed her expansive linguistic expertise in both Ukrainian and English as well as her cultural knowledge of her native Ukraine to our translations. This volume of selected works comprises: 1) translations from many of the best poems of all six of Rubchak’s published collections; 2) Mariana Rubchak’s revelatory biocritical essay “My Life with Bohdan Rubchak and His Poetry,” which includes numerous observations from her husband’s soon to be deposited archival materials; 3) Svitlana Budzhak-Jones’s essay “The Complexity and Perplexity of Bohdan Rubchak: Remarks on Translating His Poetry”; 4) a translation of the first half of Ukrainian writer and literary critic Mykola Riabchuk’s essay “The Stigmata of Wings: On the Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak”; a concise biography of Bohdan by me, checked by Mariana, which corrects various errors that persist in Internet and other published articles; and a timeline also corrected by her.

The poems listed in Afterword VI contain page numbers in parentheses from the 1991 Krylo Ikarove (The Wing of Icarus) selected works edition, the poet’s final and definitive collection, which, according to Mariana, the poet corrected meticulously. Poems that were included in this volume that come from original volumes that did not appear in that selected works edition are marked with a page number and an asterisk to indicate that the source is from the original collections. This is done to facilitate ease of reference for those who wish to compare the translations to the originals.

from the collection THE STONE GARDEN (1956)

IN A ROOM OF A HUNDRED MIRRORS

In a room of a hundred mirrors, I, self-loving,

see myself beautifully distorted. And only

in the gray garden of stone walls – on their surface –

my reflection can never betray me.

I often wear grand clothes. They

glitter on me rich in colors

on the miniature stage of my intimate theater.

But in bare

white light – between the bushes of the stone garden –

my clothing turns entirely gray, my fairy-tale mask grows pale,

the makeup of the grotesque runs, and I

become myself again.

October 1955

AUTUMN

A Byzantine cathedral – this autumn is.

Icons of the evangelists on its Royal Doors,

In deep, contemplative colors,

Framed in time-worn gold,

Forged into grape vines.

It seems – the rings of the glow like chalices of salvation

(Birth. Yes. Not a demise) –

Emerged through the mosaics of windows,

Through trembling depictions of martyrs.

And it seems the trees that have become wise –

Are a band of Christ’s disciples.

January 1955

THE LIPS OF LEAVES

The lips of leaves, somewhere nearby, call out to me –

Bohdan! They faintly beseech.

Like a lover they invite, the lips of leaves implore.

I can’t come – I’m a son of the city,

I’m a son of gray sky, not the blue sky of spring;

My day and my sleep are factory whistles.

I see spring,

because a patch of snow and soot between stone walls

became slightly smaller,

but I know spring,

for somewhere the lips of leaves confess to the sun;

and there somewhere it seems

the miracle of forgotten gods

rises and unsteadily grows.

March 1955

THE GRAVES OF MY GREAT GRANDSONS WERE HERE

The graves of my great grandsons were here,

Where you and I, my sweetheart, lie,

And to you I am – your young lover.

In the deep blue twilights of the middle ages

I showed my beloved the grass:

It grows from the children of my children.

March 1955

TO HAMLET

Not the first of books, and not the last,

and not the sagacity of a dry historian –

the skull of old Yorick

will answer all these questions.

Everything will be quite simple:

in sleep unable to overcome fatigue

you’ll find a long familiar

treasure made of yellow bone.

In the morning you’ll suddenly rise from bed,

having forgotten your losses forever:

because its dreadful smile

will teach you how to live and how to die.

NOCTURNAL MINIATURES

(Imitations of Haiku)

1.

(PEOPLE)

My small skiff

sails past others:

        between us is the abyss.

2.

(STARS)

I opened a book

of always new poems:

        I read the stars.

3.

(THE MOON)

A forlorn night wears

The medallion of her lover

        Who fell in battle yesterday.

4.

(LOVE)

Two ripe cherries

On an azure palm:

        My love and I.

5.

(A CLOUDLET)

Instead of carp

A cloudlet was caught

        In thick nets.

6.

(A LAKE)

The moon’s glow

Creates a miracle on the water:

        A road made of pearls.

7.

(A GIRL)

Black hair

Became adorned in spring

        By a cherry blossom.

MIDNIGHT IMPROVISATION

1.

You’ll knock on the door;

sharp footsteps along the littered floorboards,

and a face – a green spot in the darkness:

My mother’s ill. Don’t come in.

2.

The sky clenched you into a fist. It’s clammy.

Warm humidity chokes you. You walk. By the pavement

the black-branched stubbornness of an ailing tree is surprising.

The toothless roar of black windows knows

you’re imprisoned and the lantern watchman keeps walking behind you.

3.

Which door is it I knock on? Who’ll receive me? Who’ll

understand that your body is a ship,

that your body –

is a caravel, sunken to the bottom of some sea, with fish

kissing it, starfish, polyps touching it?

4.

You’ll feel Tomorrow on your lips like a kiss.

And the wind tomorrow will carry scraps of friezes

of hours, zephyr will carry off frag-

ments of friezes

hours,

zephyr will carry off sculptures of azure nothingness.

         And you will say:

                                    “I am.”

Today, you’re just a breath, sight, hearing – unarticulated,1

and your body – is a ship, drowned somewhere

in some sea.

January 1956

ARS POETICA

To be mute, indifferent, as always the door is closed.

To be forgotten like an old statue in a small town.

To know just the love of a stone, the opaque heart of a stone,

and to see the world in black and white shadows.

There is too much green, too much carmine rose.

Blue-arched shadows mercilessly embraced you.

There are too many nuances: love, desire, suffering –

they cloaked their lives with the murk of sadness and delight.

To search only for the essence, to search for just the horizon of being –

the essence of being. To feel space: the flight of black birds far off,

to sense time: distinct drawings in black caves,

and with an absolute wind to understand your day, poet.

March 1956

FROM THE SONG OF SONGS

Come down with me from Lebanon, my friend,

Go with me from Lebanon!

Make haste from the top of Amana,

from the top of Shenir and Hermon,

from the lions’ dens,

from the mountains where there are lynx.2

Come with me.

Give me your hand.

We spoke too much about eternity.

Give me your hand,

we know passion

only from the paintings of Tintoretto.3

Let us go together:

perhaps we’ll find the path

from this stone garden.

Yesterday a peculiar gentleman

with a beard

wearing a pince-nez came up to me,

an ichthyosaurus from the last century:

“Wissen Sie,

In dem Tiergarten hat man alle Tiere getötet.”4

Give me your hand.

I met a young man recently.

He wanted to talk to someone

about the heat burning out his brain cells.

He said to me

(speaking fast, choking in pain)

“On the other side, after passing through rain,

there stands a little bridge where the roads meet.

I walk there every day, my friend,

to look for my little tin soldier.”

Let us go,

perhaps we will find the path.

King Solomon

built for himself a palaquin

made of wood from Lebanon.

Little silver columns,

gold handrails,

seating of purple cloth,

the entire inside tidied up with love

of the daughters of Jerusalem.5

Pain glitters on nerves,

like dew on a spider web.

Barcarolles of porches, jasmine bushes, quiet

whispers –

coarse novels –

tear the baby apart prematurely

into a thousand little trembling dwarfs.

Oh, well, Thomas Buddenbrook,6

It’s hard to hang forever,

like a bridge, between two distant shores.

And again a meeting:

A paranoid guy comes up close to me.

Neon lights glow in his eyes,

a mambo twitching on his face.

What will he say to me?

He passes next to me

repeating [in English] monotonously:

“This is the last stop,

as far as we go!

This is the last stop,

as far as we go!”

Give me your hand, my love,

let us go away from here.

Let us go search for

other words, for other gardens7 near.

from the collection THE RADIANT BETRAYAL (1960)

THE RADIANT BETRAYAL

You need more solitude

than the one in four walls:

you need to fall on your knees

inside of yourself forever.

You need so many farewells

with spring, with tenderness, with the world,

to touch the edge of sunrays

at least once with your icy age.

And you need to walk for so long

in unforgivingly bright rays,

and in the mute deserts of solitude

speak the shadows to yourself

and fall into the gloom of abysses

where the fruit and angel had fallen,

so that in the shadows that you sanctified,

the radiant betrayal would burst into bloom.

1960

FOR FRANCESCA

You conceal the apocalypse beneath your

eyelids. In my rib cage an unforgivable beast

is quieting down. An assemblage of pointy-blue stars

wants to burn out what’s left of my brain.

Why are you here, why? Your worlds

have wilted beyond the point measured by Mondays;

to whom are you bringing offerings by the thousands –

voiceless, pointless ones – every night?

You attested to hundreds of deaths. Now

even the breast of the moon is rent by suffering

because an evil memory has shredded the possibility of dreams.

But still you continue to wait. Because sometimes

a fiery bird flies in and calls to you,

attesting to your lips with its wing.

FOR FRANCESCA AGAIN

The adorned hand of the mighty world

will tear up even our recollection of an image,

and something infinitely tender, something living

will wither, without waiting for a response.

In expectation you will touch a fresh branch,

but knowledge will no longer blow from it,

because a tree that’s native and new

will become petrified into a stalagmite’s cold.

Dreams, gardens, buildings, and towers

will depart, those who were friends will too –

melting in empty infinitude.

And before you even glance back, that’s when

he will enter, on his clothes

bands of eternal mist will quiet down.

THE ANGEL’S BETRAYAL

Shoulders have grown weary from clumsy wings,

like the kind on old wood engravings.

In the corners of his mouth – the smile of a sybarite,

and on sandals – the pavement’s dust.

Because he took the earth by the skyline,

the earth has taken too great of a toll:

the only truth of the myth is already concealed,

and there is no strength to imagine flight.

And though the world enticed you by the gifts of nights,

and even though the burden of things has chained you –

you will remain an uneasy stranger:

unwashed marks glisten in your eyes,

and the wings get in the way, and

the blinding recollection of that first azure burns.

– Translated by Liliana Naydan

NOVEMBER

To this day white-maned

steeds have lather in their blood,

to this day the sea speaks of another shore,

but already autumn has taken your cherry-like,

silky face into its dry palms.

To this day the nights whisper

about blistering meetings,

and a tree promises another meeting,

but already gestures become empty, and a white-lipped

recollection caresses the brow for the last time.

To this day equal to the stars

eyes rejoice in facets,

and another joy glows in mirrors of tears,

and there already is the frozen flight of a bird in your eyes:

there already is no pain in them at all.

DECEMBER

From the cold capital city of my eyes

I look at the land of the soft earth –

of sloping fields, strawberry forests,

and lustful rivers.

From the stone fortress of my being

I would want to depart through the gates of lips

onto an untrodden path – to bring a sign

to the villages of hearts.

To open the rough fence of my forehead

like the nocturnal silence of pan flutes,

and to come to them like a sable, a fox,

an owl, and a dream.

But I know: I will dress in a brocade cape

and will touch the gate with my ancestral ring –

then the frost will kill the blood of trees and

the green blood of grass.

A RECOLLECTION OF THE MOON

Fragments

When I touch your face, the tips of

my fingers open like apple blossoms,

and above us the moon

lives the life of a saint.

Then

an immaculate horizon

is born in me,

and you touch it

like a spring breeze.

But one day it will come,

the moon that used to be our friend –

and with a malevolent touch it will transform our joy

into dry sand,

but we’ll still take two handfuls of it,

pouring it from one greedy hand to another,

in vain looking for that intimate miracle

that for so long

once was with us.

We’ll still look together at the river reaches

and into the reaches of our hearts

until the cold consciousness

of the impotence of our efforts stabs us –

until we understand

that everything has already died for us.

Then we’ll bid farewell

with an awkward, slightly bemused smile,

leaving one another –

like strangers.

Somewhere beyond suns are dreams,

and in them is the world of the moon.

Rounded memories hang

on branches of silence, ripening,

like plums. I know:

Ishtar has left you

and you’re an empty garden

where white statues of solitude

resemble the whiteness of death.

Lips startled at a question.

No, it’s not time yet –

in the most distant star, the diamond-like body of death still shines,

and the festive gestures of days like a living veil

screen the consciousness of your face’s reflections

multiplied a thousand times. But remember: someday you’ll see it again

and again—

it will be framed by wilted roses, and your glance back

will turn into two pillars of salt – and your powerless gaze

will search for azure butterflies in vain.

When  

mirrors will already be fading in my eyes, 

when my palms’ trees will be turning black – 

when the last fruit will be falling from my forehead, 

and autumn will be hanging gray adornments over my temples –

be with me then. 

Be with me

when behind my eyes only  

a large empty white moon remains –

and nothing more. 

Love 

me 

then. 

Be near and dear to me –

we’ll step out to the furthest edges of being,

far beyond the cliffs, onto which waves of feelings

break apart –

to lands where expansive reaches

merge with the moon’s glow,

where there is no movement, just the universe’s eternal swaying,

where from each leaf –

from everything –

sap seeps into us giving us

total firmness,

where in the moon’s glow

shadows of our past

fade away.

With your palms you’ll lift up

the relics of the moon

to my lips.

I’ll kiss them all over,

and they’ll light up a white

fire in my soul.

It will become majestic:

all around

summer, winter, spring,

fall, summer, winter,

spring will fly by,

but it will keep burning.

And everything that touches it –

even moments –

will turn into cathedrals and trees.

The moon

with its shining