Poetry for Ukraine

[Daniel de Culla]

To read and buy:

[Ilya Semenenko-Basin]

Vasyl Stus (Василь Стус; 1938 – 1985).
Transl. by Bohdan Tokarsky.

The path submerges in the dark of sleep.
The waters of bitter oblivion reach ever
higher. And ever closer is the edge.
I gaze into the emptiness of days and years —
and wonder: where is that borderland
that brings the severed soul back
to the primordial. To the vale of pleasures
heralded by the years of youth.
Quo vadis? The disobedient step
became itself in this unceasing walk,
and you are only following its trace.
The frail ribbon of the years grows thinner,
just like your shadow coming forth to meet you
and hypnotizing you… Your road has ultimately
ended. The darkness. The abyss. The edge.
So step beyond the verge. We cannot live
with this uncertainty. Between. By just half a step.
As if the foot was raised and paused,
and then it froze. A half-desire
cut off by semi-hesitation. Extensive borderlands
conceal themselves behind the hills of anguish —
the daring aims of space can’t see them.
Oh, what if that edge could know
that we are fractured! What does it take
for a mountain to become a mountain? What if we
could move these borderlands of time,
these borderlands of lingering
when the withered figures of desire,
these storms of passion, now reduced to ashes,
have fallen suddenly on us.

[Ilya Semenenko-Basin]

Vasyl Stus (Василь Стус; 1938 – 1985).
Transl. by Bohdan Tokarsky.

I knew: the world concealed itself from me,
behind each thing another thing is hiding
and trotting at my heels. All the while
refusing to unveil to me its genuine appearance,
because that trust and amity between
man and the world have now been lost.
It’s not for nothing that the smallest birds
recoil from me, that fish disperse
the moment they notice a human figure,
that with their fragile beauty flowers want
to save themselves from me (the final
splinter of hope that human beings
are not entirely disgraceful). After all,
I thought, the harmony of worlds
has not bypassed humanity, instead
it marked a certain distance: here
is the limit of your belonging to the world.