Poems by Halyna Petrosanyak

Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan

These poems in translation were originally published in The Artful Dodge 46/47. In solidarity with the Ukrainian people, The Dodge is republishing these poems with permission from Halyna Petrosanyak.

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Ukrainian poet and literary translator Halyna Petrosanyak was born in 1969 in the tiny village of Cheremoshna.  As writer Yuri Andrukhovych has remarked, only bears and vampires in Transylvania roam beyond the village, which lies in the wildest part of the Carpathian Mountains at the edge of the Romanian border.[1]  Today, Ms. Petrosanyak resides in Ivan-Frankivsk, a quiet, provincial city near the foothills of the Carpathians.  The city was formerly known as Stanislav, and Ms. Petrosanyak is part of what Ukrainian literary culture has called "The Stanislav Phenomenon," which refers to the fact that a circle of brilliant, philosophically-oriented postmodernist writers including Yuri Andrukhovych, Yuri Izdryk, and Taras Prokhasko have emerged from this somewhat unexpected place on the periphery of Ukraine.  The very word "phenomenon" also echoes the phenomenological quest at the core of the work of virtually all of these writers, a paradigm into which Petrosanyak's poetry appropriately fits.

Petrosanyak has published two collections of poetry to date: Park on the Slope (1996), and Lights of the Borderland (2000).  She contributes regularly to the literary periodicals and almanacs of Western Ukraine, and is active in civic, educational, and environmental causes in that corner of the Ukrainian world.  She translates extensively from Czech and German into Ukrainian.  In fact, she has spent a considerable amount of time in Prague, Vienna, and other parts of Europe—places that provide significant stimuli to her creativity.  Quite aptly she refers to herself as a "migratory bird" in one of her poems.  The poem "The Dominican School," from her second collection, earned the prestigious Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group's prize for poem of the year in Ukraine.  She also has formal training as a scholar and defended her dissertation in 2001 on the poetics of Joseph Roth’s prose at the Ivano-Frankivsk Pedagogical Institute.

I first met Halyna three years ago at a translation studies conference in the scenic Carpathian resort town of Yaremche, next to which a swift mountain river runs noisily down a mountain pass. Tall and remarkably thin, Halyna struck me as a shy, introspective person. There was an avian quality about her in her bearing, in her gestures, in her eyes, in the shape of her hair. She seemed ready to take flight at any moment, much like the migratory bird of her poetry.

Her poetry impressed me immediately as being very different from that of other Ukrainian poets I had translated before.  It was fresh, like the mountain air of Yaremche, yet fragile: no pretension, no oversized intrusive poetic self.  There was a spare quality to her words, a minimalism.  I sensed a poet flowing between two worlds—the wild and majestic Carpathians with their rushing waters and the urban world of civilization and its enduring architectural past.  Her poetic project includes a reconstruction of a nostalgic Prague and Vienna, a Hapsburg Empire in which Ukrainian cultural growth flourished until the destructive onslaught of World War I and later the Soviet empire.  A third line of her poetics is the world of ancient myth that serves to allow her to distill her emotional state in her own time and space.  Like Petrosanyak herself, many of the figures of myth to which she alludes, including Theseus and Odysseus, are travelers on a quest.

There is a dramatic sense of place in Petrosanyak's poetry, from mountain localities that for her are "a trap for time," with "wintry landscapes—harsh majestic places" where frozen trees sing "filled with longing, like the sound of a shepherd's flute,” to scenes of jazz musicians playing on the Charles River Bridge in Prague and puppeteers on Stefanplatz in Vienna.  The poems of Petrosanyak are akin to telegraphically terse poetic messages that evoke philosophical kernels of wisdom, such as the insight that "journeys are the best way to get used to uncertainty."  Her literal journeys from her Western Ukrainian homeland to Europe give her poetry an innate sense of place in which she can explore her emotional and philosophical world.  They give us glimpses into her magical borderland.  

—Michael M. Naydan, University Park, Pennsylvania, January 2005 

[1] In his article “Stanislav and the Phenomenon of Fermentation” (http://vitaly.rivne.com/andrukhovych/artc_14.htm).

This life is pleasant to the smell, to the taste, to the touch:
a monogrammed table cloth, music in a hall with a fireplace.
And in the morning, raising coffee to your lips, you feel that tiny wire in your
lip
and remember who you are and what's keeping you in these walls.
You don't care that the wire hurts—it's the skin of one, who in time
has passed through no less than half a century, covering space,
it, in fact, became rough and numb, it’s hard not to notice,
for example, that the lettering of the monograms is in Latin.
“Life is beautiful,”
you say to yourself without any sarcasm or masochism, 
admiring the brocade of the meadow or the scent of fresh hay.
But the presence of the hook turns the expression of bliss into a grimace,
like the smile of the tragic actor beneath Harlequin's mask.


 

I’m happy to live in a city, where hesitantly, grandly,
expectations already that once nearly seemed hopeless are coming true,
where an itinerant philosopher drinks his first morning coffee
beneath his own balcony, next to the café door.
I’m happy in the morning to dive into the streams of streets,
noticing pearls of glances in their depths,
and not collecting them. I’m joyful that all this has come to be:
spring in a city of rains, peerless wines
of days that in the cellars of eternity have been waiting for me,
the yellowish extension of an alley of lindens, 
in September. And my ability—strange and unfathomable—
to just keep my reading privileges in the archives of memory

 
 

We crossed the border. We tore flowers in someone else’s fields
quietly uttering the words of a first heard language,
we spent the night under the bare sky, and our homeland appeared 
less and less in our dreams, and, nearly always its wintry
landscapes—harsh, majestic places,
are marked with the stamp of immutability. We forgot
the rare voices of its birds, the scent of home, and this
ability seemed more fitting, than a hindrance.
The rapture from living here reached its high point.
But at times in innocent conversations the name of
an odd beggar from Ithaca, the misunderstood Odysseus, puzzled us.

 
 

When the rains begin here and on Stefanplatz,
the owner of the comic marionette won't be there anymore,
and coachmen will ride with the top raised, and the work
of those who sweep the streets will become more complicated,
and the way of things creates fall, then I, surely, will be bold enough
to write you a letter because it's not right
to forget good friends, And I’ll say
I was in a house of butterflies,
and the colors on their wings
are the best proof that God exists.
And about the fact that I walk the Street of the Favorites every morning,
And that I dream dreams in German, that I can’t
recreate the beauty and nobleness of the city in words.
About the ability of the city dwellers to smile to strangers,
about Andrew Lloyd Weber now amusing the public at the opera,
I’ll tell you and, of course, I won’t utter
a single word about how sad I am without you.

 
 

A settlement in the mountains where sounds of the current interweave with my
dreams,
where workdays are as heavy as a ton of salt, and the holidays are lazy  and
empty,
where a doe’s shrieks (or is it a wood nymph?) at midnight, as strange as it
sounds,
brings calm, once more affirming that I am at home, otherwise it would have
been impossible
to hear these sounds and not be horrified. The leaves of a walnut tree,
in whose shadow I grew up, are slowly changing color,
it is toiling to keep summer inside itself. And in my field
of vision nothing suggests the fin de siecle. This is solace—
to return home as though it were not in space, but in time
you are traveling; a familiar cold clenches your forearm,
and a well-known road, as earlier, still leads 
in the direction of the late middle ages.

 
 

A Winter’s Lullaby for a Butterfly

My butterfly, winter is still holding on,
honey freezing on artificial flowers,
all the colors have flowed into white, wings wither.
My butterfly, why can’t you sleep?
Like light in the dull corners of days
blinking from your fading parting colors,
as these wintry walls bloom
from the light outlines of your shadow.
Not a single entomologist would guess
what lured you to these expanses,
the tender white flowers of whose palms 
you came to heat with your warmth.
Lifting up my light body over the earth,
my soul has descended onto your fire;
so deliberately, so trustfully, so happily.
My butterfly, are you mirage or marvel?

 
 

Un-ordered space remains behind me.
The scent of rotted words no longer haunts me,
an obtrusive sound that recalls beating your head against the wall
deadens to the sound of the triumphal voices
of an as yet unknown fowl and, finally, it floats away
like a headache, like the fear of losing sight or your hearing.
Bristly lips utter sola gratia, the hissing
of darting, amphibious creatures and the buzzing of poisonous flies quiet down.
And a silence comes, in which I,
whose passion to changes in decoration pushes away the falling of the curtain,
hear as the one, in whose presence I breathe unsteadily, steadily breathes in
sleep
a thousand kilometers from here.

 
 

The Return

From above, the valley reminds you of a rusted bowl. It’s evening time.
Heavenly flocks float to the Lord’s sheepfolds.
A traveler raising his head, accompanies the clouds
with a burned through gaze with a shade of nostalgia.
Since long ago these eyes have known no joy or peace.
An invisible dust-cloud of wrong paths penetrated the pores of his face,
shoulders stooped from the weight. Now he knows what happened,
the truth, chosen in youth, turned out to be too difficult to handle
and completely rotten inside. Rising up on the slope
he hears in the valley that looks like a rusted bowl
a scruffy dog whining, yelping, and pigs grunting,
and the wind touches a bell that had been covered in dust.
The traveler quickens his pace, though his wobbly knees
can barely cope with the road. 
And the silhouette of his forgotten father waits immutably
before the threshold once abandoned in a lack of faith.

 
 

I love this road at 6:30 in the morning, when
The solitary wind wakes up on a bench in the city square,
At a time of life when you sleep soundly no matter what bed,
When you already don't want to open every existing door,
Just certain ones. Along the Collegium,
Through Sheptytsky Square and
To the wall of the holy Cathedral, behind which it's always bright,
And never-changing street sweepers gather up the fallen leaves
From the street of an Osyp Sorokhtei drawing.

 
 

I step back from the depth of the ruins, swallowing bitter smoke,
leaving what has been conquered for you—you’re not the enemy, of course.
Outlines of the mountain foothills, like the premonition of the touch
of a hand, of a heart, of changes in the relief of being. All has not yet
turned into dust. The favorable, relatively dry
climate in these latitudes will reduce the signs of ruin.
Tomorrow—I know—birds will fly here again.
(I just hope it won’t be ravens and crows.)

 
 

To remain at the Dominican school near Vienna forever,
To pray just in Ukrainian to the surprise of the nuns.
To write letters sometimes to family after vespers,
Asking how their health is, and how their gardens are doing.
To go to the market every day along Schlossbergstrasse,
To get used to having enough, to buy a car,
To live in harmony with yourself, thanking the Savior
For the fact that all has turned out so well. And suddenly
After about twenty years, when no one
Any longer recognizes the foreigner in you, to wake up at dawn,
To pray in Ukrainian again, surprising people,
And not removing the garb of a Dominican nun,
Knowing well what and for what you're changing,
To set off on the road intending not to return,
Surprising those who didn't think the word "homeland" has
Such an inconceivable dimension
And surprised yourself.

 
 

Michael M. Naydan has published over 50 articles on literary topics and more than 80 translations in journals and anthologies. His more than 40 books of published and edited translations include Yuri Vynnychuk’s novel Tango of Death and Maria Matios’ novel Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages, both with Spuyten Duyvil Publishers in New York in 2019; Nikolai Gumilev’s Africa (Glagoslav Publishers, 2018); Yuri Andrukhovych’s essays, My Final Territory: Selected Essays (U of Toronto Press, 2018); and Abram Terz’s literary essays, Strolls with Pushkin and Journey to the River Black (Columbia U Press, 2016). In 2017 he published his literary essays in Ukrainian translation in the volume, From Gogol to Andrukhovych: Selected Literary Essays (Piramida Publishers). He has also published a novel about the city of Lviv Seven Signs of the Lion (Glagoslav Publishers, 2016), which appeared in 2017 in Ukrainian translation under the title Sim znakiv leva (Piramida Publishers). He has received numerous prizes for his translations including the George S.N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013.

Published March 14 2022