The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych - (Paperback)

About the Book

This essential collection introduces the poetry of Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) to new audiences, and includes many first-time English translations, a biographical sketch by Michael M. Naydan, and a comprehensive introduction by Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world's leading experts on the work of this remarkable Ukrainian poet.

Book Synopsis

Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) is not as well-known as Slavic modernist poets Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, or their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, but he unquestionably should be. Sometimes compared to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, Antonych, who described himself as "an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring," created during his brief lifetime powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. Born in the Lemko region of Poland, Antonych adopted Ukrainian as his literary language when he moved to Lviv, and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape. This essential collection introduces Antonych's work to new audiences, and includes a biographical sketch by the translator and a comprehensive introduction by Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world's leading experts on this remarkable poet.

Review Quotes

" . . . as far as Naydan's selection is concerned, The Essential Poetry is truly excellent and leaves almost nothing to be desired . . . a praiseworthy and important step in the process of introducing this major Ukrainian poet (still largely unknown in the West) to readers and scholars in the English-language world."-- "Journal of Ukrainian Studies"

"[Antonych's] poems . . . deserve to be read alongside the work of his great contemporaries, such as Lorca and Mandelstam. It's there that the poet's metaphoric power comes fully into its own. Michael Naydan has done a major service in carrying over Antonych's dense, syntactically supple verse into English."--Askold Melnyczuk "poet, novelist, and professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston"

"Between Arcadia and catastrophe--this is where the Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych fearlessly searched for the truth, 'the primeval word' that shapes the work of the most original literary explorers. Though his life was cut short in 1937, before he had reached the age of thirty, he produced a number of memorable poems, all of which live on in the musically rich translations of Michael Naydan. Longing to transcend his dark moment in history, Antonych was determined to find his 'home beyond a star, ' in poems that reflect what he learned from translating Rilke, reading Whitman and Czeslaw Milosz, and imagining how 'the night heals everyone forever.' His ecstasies and elegies are indeed essential reading."--Christopher Merrill "author of On the Road to Lviv"

"In Ukraine, Antonych was and remains something akin to a poetic cult figure, first and foremost among younger poets. The striking innovativeness of his poetic mode of thinking has profoundly shaped the creative expressiveness of succeeding generations, including the most recent."--Yuri Andrukhovych "Ukrainian poet, novelist, and essayist"

"These translations bring us the intimate and ecstatic visions of a young poet as he steps onto the world stage. Through an archetypal animation of nature, where 'woodpeckers strike green sparks from the trees, ' we follow Antonych, 'a pagan in love with life, ' in search of 'the primal word'--'fire, a god, a bird, or a storm'--and by his exuberance, between 'human fear and rapture, ' we are lead through his visionary journey, where 'Sleepwalkers sing on the roofs, / landscapes turn silver, / walls in rooms rustle like the forest, / and the dead moon, the blue moon / opens five gates of night / above a black and glimmering city.' These are magical poems."--James Brasfield "translator of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha"

About the Author

BOHDAN IHOR ANTONYCH (1909-37) was an early twentieth-century Lemko-Ukrainian poet. He received a degree in Slavic studies at Lviv University and published five books of poetry before his untimely death at age 28.

MICHAEL M. NAYDAN is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University in State College. He is the translator or co-translator of over 40 books, including Zelensky: A Biography, with Alla Perminova.

LIDIA STEFANOWSKA is a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of Warsaw in Poland. She is the author of Antonych, Antynomii [Antonych, Antinomies], a deep analysis of Bohdan Ihor Antonych's work.