BOOK REVIEW: Poems of Lysheha in translation (01/23/00)

BOOK REVIEW

Poems of Lysheha in translation

"The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" translated by Oleh Lysheha and James Brasfield. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xxvii, 121 pp.

by Olena Welhasch

"The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" is a collection of Ukrainian poems as well as a play, meticulously translated into English. The collection contains a preface with a foreword by Prof. George G. Grabowicz of Harvard University and an introduction by James Brasfield, a Pennsylvania State University English professor who has been collaborating with Mr. Lysheha on translating the latter's poetry since 1993.

Mr. Lysheha's work relays to the reader the imperceptible unity of all things under nature, merging animal and cosmic existence. His poetry's breath units (the expression of a thought in the time of a breath) resemble those of D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, whose poetry Mr. Lysheha translated into Ukrainian in his first publication "Velykyi Mist" (Great Bridge).

The poet's lifestyle embraces simplicity - in fact, for years Mr. Lysheha has lived on the brink of indigence, is inspired by one of his favorite writer-philosophers, Henry Thoreau. In Mr. Lysheha's work, questions of life, death and reincarnation, reflecting Buddhist and Taoist influences and shamanic undercurrents, are echoed in his ability to hear and understand language of nature and transcend time in his autobiographical journey to the "ancient myth of return," as Prof. Brasfield notes in his introduction.

Mr. Lysheha concentrated his studies in American and English literature at Lviv University in the late 1960s. One semester short of completing his degree, Mr. Lysheha was expelled from the university for publishing poems and an essay in the "samvydav" literary almanac "Skrynia" (The Chest). The work was neither nationalistic nor one of protest, yet Communist Party officials felt that it violated official aesthetic and ideological dictums.

At the time of his expulsion, Mr. Lysheha was a member of the Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of writers, painters, sculptors, musicians and critics. Other members of the group, Mykola Ryabchuk, poet and critic, and singer and song-writer Viktor Morozov were also dismissed from their respective universities for publishing Skrynia, while poet Hryhorii Chubai, proclaimed to be the Bohema ringleader by the KGB, was arrested.

Shortly after his expulsion, Mr. Lysheha was drafted by the Soviet army. He first served as an infantryman, building a road through a forest 60 miles from Moscow. Eventually he was exiled to Buriatia, where he worked as an office clerk and later as a school teacher. After being discharged from the army in 1974, Mr. Lysheha continued to teach in Buriatia, a region where many of the people had converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the 18th century and strongly resisted a Russian presence.

In 1975 Mr. Lysheha returned to his hometown of Tysmenytsia in the Carpathian region, where he had been born in 1949. Eventually the poet moved to Lviv, and continued to work odd jobs. In the 1980s Mr. Lysheha served as a set decorator for the Karpenko Karyi Theatrical and Cinematic Institute in Kyiv.

Published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" is divided into three parts. The first part includes "Songs" from his first book; the second part is composed of Mr. Lysheha's play "Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu," whose characters struggle to exist in a world confined by barbed wire; the third includes poems depicting movement, literally and figuratively. In the poem "Fox," the author compares his childhood in the Carpathian Mountains with life in Kyiv, questions what it means to be civilized:

"I stepped closer
To a sunken burrow..
Slowly, I raked the surface of ashes,
Then pushed my hand inside
and there, among the roots like severed veins,
Touched a quiet heart, still warm..
Seems as if in Kyiv, on the opposite side of the woods,
Someone never stops conjuring spells..
I come back lifeless from the city..
In the streets I often meet the dead..
I offer my hand, dead eyes smile back,
The dead, pushing themselves, making a place for me
In a subway car.."

In 1997, Mr. Lysheha was awarded a one-year Fulbright scholarship to the United States. The poet presently spends most of his time in Lviv and Tysmenytsia.

The book is available for $12.95 from Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138; phone, (617) 495-4714.

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