Back to Issue Fifty-Three

Looking over an Autumnal Lake

BY VASYL STUS TRANS. BY ALAN ZHUKOVSKI

This smallpox-scarred autumnal lake, so black—
the anthracite of visions and the flint of scream—
lies glinting with the eyes of Lucifer.

Abyss besots and rubs against my legs.

I see the ravens of the future times
break out of it and make the blackness bleed,
and, razor-winged, they rush upon the sky,
the fragile blue, upon high-throated pines
and to my head, deprived of hope and doomed.

My hoarsened eyes start merging into one—
the repetition of this dismal lake
that has been forced inside my skull.
Exposed,
without a refuge, do you hear and feel
the chilly draft that runs inside your soul?

 

[This Crowd of Expectations and Young Deaths]

BY VASYL STUS TRANS. BY ALAN ZHUKOVSKI

This crowd of expectations and young deaths,
which rise above despair, this wobbly road
where impulse always overtakes your fright
and fear, like shackles, drags along behind
your speedy legs—all this abruptly reached
a cul-de-sac and came to know its edge.
And each of us got into blinding light.
The sun, for us, broke into little shards.
Now take it piece by piece, like prosphora.
The light we keep inside our memories
will be enough, and there’s no stronger one.
We saw the recent wall come down behind us.

 

Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) was a poet, translator, and literary critic, widely regarded as one of the foremost authors in the Ukrainian language. He is renowned for his acutely tragic philosophical poems, complex imagery, and frequent use of rare words and self-invented neologisms. Although very few of his literary works dealt with political issues, he was repressed for his support of the Ukrainian dissident movement and for his criticism of the Soviet Union’s colonial Russianization policies that sought to eliminate the national identity of Ukrainians. Stus spent many years of his life in prisons (labor camps) and internal exile. The KGB often confiscated the manuscripts of his—mostly nonpolitical—poems and translations (including Rilke, Goethe, and Kipling), many of which were destroyed and lost to posterity. Vasyl Stus authored six poetry collections, five of which have survived: The Circuit (1965), Winter Trees (1968), The Merry Cemetery (1971), The Time of Creativity (Dichtenszeit) (1972), and Palimpsests (1971–1977). Although Stus’s work was banned in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian diaspora in Western Europe and the United States published two books of his verse during his lifetime: Winter Trees in 1970 and A Candle in a Mirror in 1977. 

Alan Zhukovski‘s poems and translations have appeared in The London Magazine, The Nation, The Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Oxford Poetry, Tin House Online, New Statesman, and elsewhere.

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