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An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Ten
VASYL HOLOBORODKO
Our Ukrainian Language
Each word
in our language
is from the Song already sung
and we use these words
when we talk
with our blood brothers
Each word
in our language
is recorded in the Living Chronicle
so that our enemies know
which words we use
when we are on our own and silent
Translated from the Ukrainian
by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
First published in The
Frontier: 28
Contemporary Ukrainian Poets, ed. and transl. by Anatoly
Kudryavitsky. Glagoslav Publications, UK, 2017.
Vasyl Holoborodko is
a Ukrainian poet born in Andrianopil near Luhansk in 1945. He
studied the Ukrainian language at the University
of Kiev and the University
of Donetsk, from which he was
expelled
for possessing a banned book on the russification of Ukraine.
He wasn't allowed to study
in the Gorky Institute for Literature, Moscow,
so he only completed his education in 2001, after years of working as a
miner
and a farmhand. He also researched into Ukrainian folklore, and these
materials
were later published in book-form. He eventually settled in Luhansk,
which he
had to leave in 2014 following the Russian invasion. He now lives in
Irpen. His
first collection, The Flying Window, was published by a small
émigré
publishing in Baltimore,
USA.
He had to wait until 1988 for
his next one, Green Day, to come out. He has since published
another
seven collections, the latest being White Room Plants (2013),
as well as
two books of his collected poems. English translations comprised the
book
titled Icarus with Butterfly Wings (Exile Editions, Toronto,
1991). In
1988, he was the recipient of the Vasyl Symonenko Prize; in 1994, of
the Taras
Shevchenko National Award, and in 2012, of the Mykola Hohol's
International
Award. In 2014, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.
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