Vasyl Holoborodko (1945) is known as the living legend of Ukrainian poetry. His poems have an elemental simplicity and power reminiscent of other east European writers such as Miroslav Holub. However his voice is also unlike any other poet’s. These pieces, deceptively simple and open, explore the themes of war, loss and exile, in a way that is both complex and immediately accessible. Sometimes they seem like grotesque fairy tales, or snatches from the interior monologue that runs through all our heads.
First he was forced to leave Kyiv university in 1965 and then he was expelled from Donetsk university in 1966 for distributing a then prohibited book, Internationalism or Russification?, by the Ukrainian dissident and writer Ivan Dziuba. Subsequently he tried to complete his education in 1967 at the Moscow Maxim Gorky Institute, but he wasn’t allowed to take his exams. He was prohibited to publish his poems for 18 years. However during the periods of Perestroika and Independence he produced book after book of poems.
He returned to his native Luhansk in 2004 but was compelled to move by the outbreak of war in 2014. However he observed that his village gradually changed and as his parents, friends and acquaintances died or moved away, new people came, some of whom would refer mockingly to him as “Bandera”, after the Ukrainian nationalist leader. “I became a foreigner in my own native village” he said in one interview.
Vasyl was reluctant to talk about the war directly because of the delicacy of the situation in the occupied territories. But what you have here is a painfully raw account of loss and exile. Nothing but the poems.
The downed Aircraft
They summoned us urgently
To the site of the plane crash
To sweep all traces away
So it would be as though nothing had happened
And then covered again by grass.
The plane was important
For those who set him to work
And for him too,
Because without it his job wasn’t complete,
But then it turned out
The plane meant nothing to anyone:
Because it was downed and left to lay in the grass
But the bodies of the lost
Were taken by several cars.
We only saw them
As they drove past
And two dogs ran over
And scampered hither and thither
Before running off.
We just had to wash away
The blood sprinkled on the grass
(An epiphany
A downed aircraft is not an aircraft
But a symbol of “becoming that
Which cannot return to its previous state”)
THREAT-DUCKLING
You expect any threats in advance
Having two eyes in your head you watch out,
So you can at least see that threat
Even if you can’t see it.
So it was worth me stepping back
(Though there are no eyes in the back of your head)
As the threat morphed into something so small:
A little duckling at my feet
Still in its fluff, and withal
The tips of its wings a brilliant blue
If that’s how it was, or became
Because I accidentally stepped forwards
When I stepped back.
If this was always the case:
You would take that little duckling in your hands,
And bear them back to the nest
Where, warming her young,
The mother duck rests.
(Epiphany:
The duckling is not a duckling
But a symbol signifying no less
Than “being that which is completely defenceless”)
THE BIG RAT
I’m not sure about my means of defence and this
Makes me scary: my own powerlessness.
I regret nothing although there were things
Not as valuable as valuable memory,
And every night and some mornings
And sometimes during the day
Mice appeared from every hole, nook and cranny
And gnawed my pitiable treasury away.
And every night and some mornings,
And sometimes during the day,
I got used to it
And even now I see with my own eyes
They gnaw my clothes, crockery and books,
Nibbling the foundations until the walls fall down.
I’ll have to protect myself somehow,
I place mousetraps in the corners,
Strew poison in secret places,
But nothing does any good,
Their ruination continues,
Accompanied by a self confidence
Which is what impresses me most
Even overcoming my regret for my losses.
When it gets calmer
Because I’ve nothing left to lose
Not because the means of battling against it have helped
Out of nowhere
A big rat appears
Instead of the small mice
Just as confident as the titchy destroyers before him
And sets to work.
(Epiphany
The rat is not a rat
But a symbol
“of being that which is more than usual”)
On the Impossibility of Return
Return is not only my presence now,
In the land I was absent from for so long
Okay it’s possible to go back there in my head,
But a real return
Is the restoration of the names of everything things that surround you:
I stand under a tree, laden with pears,
Such long pears curved like little pitchers,
But it’s not a particular type,
Just the usual wild pear,
And I can’t remember its name at all,
Just remember that it had some sort of name.
I recall a pear that produces hard pears,
A bony pear
A pear that was plucked and laid for a long while
A bed-pear, but some people call them rottens,
and what are those beautiful pears called –
I have no memory
And my old friend whom I ask about the name of these pears
Can’t help me
Just a pear and that’s all – he says
But I know that it has another name,
Which I can’t remember
Standing here under the tree
laden with pears,
Such long pears curved like little pitchers,
(Epiphany:
The name is not the name of the pear –
But a symbol
“Of being that which is immutable”)
THE NAMING OF THINGS IN FOREIGN LANDS
“What do they call you?”
I say, stood before a flower at the side of the path,
A flower with six yellow petals,
And am utterly unable to remember its name,
A name I once knew,
It’s not hard to remember the names of the first spring blooms
There are so few of them.
Perhaps distance is to blame,
I knew the name in my homeland,
But in this foreign terrain,
I have forgotten.
A foreign place
Is a land where you forget the names of well-known flowers.
“What do they call you?”
“They call me the flower with six yellow petals
To which the butterfly floats while its wings are red
To which the bee flies while it buzzes.”
Picking up my Traces
I lean over, to pick up my traces,
If someone saw me
They would think I was picking mushrooms
Or a medicinal herb
Or a bunch of flowers,
But no
I am picking up my traces,
The traces of all my steps in all the places
Where I have walked for many years.
Here are the traces from when I pastured sheep in the Steppe
And here are the traces on the path where I walked to school
And here are the traces where I walked to and from work.
“I am gathering up my traces
So strangers do not trample over them”
I tell everyone who is interested
(Epiphany
Traces are not traces
But a symbol signifying
“being that which remains in the past”)
Without placing them I place my traces
Between the pages of a book;
Now that I do not turn over the page of a book read before
And encounter my traces from long ago,
The childish trace beneath a cherry tree,
How many traces have been gathered up until today
A whole herbarium of footsteps in books
An if I lined them up in a row
I would be equal to them going back then
To where I shall not return.
SERPENT WALLS
Throughout Ukraine
And around every village and town
High earthen walls are reared
Among the people they have long been known
As serpentine.
Ceramicist Historians, and archaeologists study
At what time they were erected
Using radiocarbon analysis
But can’t determine a precise date.
If we can’t work out how ancient they are
Then they have existed forever
So many Ukrainians live here.
They call these walls serpentine
Because they believe they were reared thanks to a snake
Who was harnessed to a plough by the sacred blacksmiths
Kuzma and Demyan
And the hunk of earth from its ploughing
Is that serpentine rampart
For who else could have ploughed it
Apart from a snake!
(Epiphany
A snake is not a snake
But a symbol signifying
“to be the one who has great strength)
The ramparts were built
To defend against the frosts
That came from the forests
So some believe
To defend against the cannibals
That came from the forest
Or so others believe
To defend against the foes
That came from the forest
So others believe.
But no, it was not thanks to the ploughing of that snake
It was our ancestors who reared them
Around each village and town
To protect the snake
Against the frosts
That came from the forest
Against the cannibals
That came from the forest
Against the foes
That came from the forest
(Epiphany
A snake is not a snake
But a symbol signifying
“to be the one who has great strength
For the fulfilment of our traditions”)
So they rise above all Ukraine
Around each village and town
Ramparts of piled earth, serpentine
Still protecting our snake
Still protecting our traditions
Every year the ramparts grow higher
And not because we each pour a capful of earth on them
But from the graves of our soldiers
The defenders of our snake
The defenders of our tradition
Buried in these ramparts serpentine
Around each village and town.
When I die I ask
That you bury me on those serpentine ramparts
So that by at least the thickness of the sheet
Of this paper with the verse I write
The rampart serpentine
Will rise around our Ukraine.
This piece is the fifth of a series of articles about Ukrainian authors that will be included in an anthology entitled “Welcome to the Occupation” and published by Kalyna Language Press in 2018
Steve Komarnyckyj is a PEN award winning literary translator and poet whose work is published by Kalyna Language Press and features on the PEN World Bookshelf. You can e mail him on stevekomoffice(at)zoho.eu
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