AT 1:30 p.m. EST on Sunday, September 12, at a Zoom reading sponsored by Cervena Barva Press. It provided an opportunity to meet several Ukrainian poets and translators. Ukrainian poets Oles Ilchenko (Kyiv and Zurich) and Mariya Tytarenko (Lviv) have read and discussed their poetry both in the original and in translation. Translators and readers have read translations from the poetry of legendary poets from the recent past – Oleh Lysheha, Bohdan Rubchak, Vasyl Symonenko, and Attyla Mohylny.
The meeting was held by famous translator Michael Naydan, one among the guests of the meeting – our respectable head of the department Vasyl Bialyk.
THE POETS
Oles Ilchenko (born 1957) is a Ukrainian poet and culturologist from Kyiv, Ukraine, who currently
resides in Zurich, Switzerland. He is the author of twenty-two children’s books, the novels City with
Chimeras (2009) and My Beloved Kyara (2011) and a book of memoirs of the 1970s-
1990s, Collectors of the Mists: Subjective Notes from a Life in Kyiv (2017). His seven books of
poetry include: A Wintry Garden (1991), Constellation AS (1993), A Different
Landscape (1997), Pages (2004), Cities and Islands (2004), Conversation before Silence (2005),
and Certain Dreams, or A Kyiv which is Not (2007). He is among the first modern Ukrainian poets
to write primarily in free verse.
Mariya Tytarenko (born 1981) is the winner of the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize for her
collection Impasto. She is a professor of Digital Media Studies and Journalism at the Catholic
University of Lviv. She also teaches one of the first courses in creative writing in Ukraine. She is an
essayist as well whose book Communication from Scratch. Essays for My Daughter Manya was
shortlisted for the Ukrainian Booker Prize in essay writing. Here is an excerpt of the
book: https://fountainmagazine.com/2016/issue-113-september-october-2016/the-age-of-my-
daughter-manya-or-the-butterfly-effect. Her long poem Bridges, dedicated to Paul Celan, is featured
in a special Ukrainian issue of Trafika Europe as an animation on
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8XeH2QyGW8.
Bohdan Rubchak (1935-2018) was one of the leading Ukrainian poets of the New York Group of
Ukrainian writers, who emigrated from Ukraine via German Displaced Persons camps after World
War II. He also was a well-respected scholar of Ukrainian and comparative literature at the U. of
Illinois at Chicago, where he taught until his retirement. He was the author of six books of
poetry—Stone Orchard (1956), Radiant Betrayal (1960), For a Girl without a Country (1963), A
Personal Clio (1967), Drowning Marena (1980)—and a volume of collected works, The Wing of
Icarus (1983 and 1991).
Oleh Lysheha (1949-2014) was a legendary Ukrainian poet, playwright, essayist, and translator,
and one of the most original poets in modern Ukrainian literature. He fused the arc of Ukrainian
literature and folk traditions with Western and Eastern influences to create lyric and narrative
poems that transform intimate moments of being to timeless and universal experiences of
transcendence, embodying the existential and political pressures of our time, his work spanning
from his Soviet-era exile in Buryatia to The Maidan.
Vasyl Symonenko (1935-1963) was a poet, journalist, and dissident who was according to some
accounts brutally beaten by the KGB, after which he died six months later. He was one of the
leading writers of the Writers of the Sixties (Shestdesiatnyky) movement of Ukrainian poets who
sought freedom to write outside the demands of the stifling state-imposed doctrine of Social
Realism. Only one collection of his poetry Silence and Thunder (1962) appeared during his lifetime,
though posthumous collections appeared abroad and in Soviet Ukraine. He became a legendary
figure in the literary underground and was rehabilitated around the time of Ukrainian independence.
Attyla Mohylny (1963-2008) was a Ukrainian poet who authored two books of poetry early in his
career: Rattling above the Rooftops (1987) and Contours of the City (1991). The poetry of
Mohylny completely breaks with the tradition of rhyme and meter that dominated Ukrainian poetics
until only recent years and, except for Kyivan realia, fits seamlessly into Western late modernity.
TRANSLATORS AND OTHER PARTICIPANTS
Michael Bernosky is a professional American stage and screen actor who resides in Boalsburg,
Pennsylvania. He has numerous times participated in dramatic readings of various Ukrainian poets
and writers including Yuri Andrukhovych and Viktor Neborak in performances throughout the
United States, Canada, and Ukraine.
James Brasfield’s third book of poems from Louisiana State University Press, Cove, is
forthcoming in March 2023. Twice a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he is the translator (with
Lysheha) of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (HURI, Harvard UP), which received The PEN
Award for Poetry in Translation and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for
Translation. He’s received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Svitlana Budzhak Jones is a contract interpreter for the U.S. Department of State. She has her
Ph.D. in linguistics from the U. of Ottawa and works as a professional translator and interpreter.
She also teaches language courses in Ukrainian and Russian at Penn State University. She co-
translated with Michael Naydan The Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak: Songs of Love, Songs of
Death, Songs of the Moon, which was published by Glagoslav Publishers.
Michael Naydan is translator, co-translator, or editor of over 40 books of translations from
Ukrainian and Russian as well as over 100 articles and translations in literary journals. He is
Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Penn State University.
Marian Rubchak is a retired history professor at Valparaiso University and a leading expert in
Ukrainian women’s studies and feminism. As the widow of Ukrainian poet Bohdan Rubchak, she
has tirelessly worked to promote his legacy as a poet. She has provided a lengthy biographical
introduction to her husband’s selected works in translation published by Glagoslav Publishers and is
also currently writing her more detailed memoirs of him and The New York Group of poets.