The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies

"Some of the poems from Antonych's The Book of the Lion, as well as from the posthumously published The Green Gospel and Rotations deserve to be read alongside the work of his great contemporaries, such as Garcia 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 Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Massachusetts at Boston

"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

This volume gathers together translations of the best works from all six of the extraordinary extant collections by Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych's (1909-37): A Greeting to Life (1931), The Grand Harmony (1932-33), Three Rings (1934), The Book of the Lion (1936), The Green Gospel (1938), and Rotations (1938), as well as poetry published separately. It includes a translator's note and a biographical sketch on the poet by Michael M. Naydan and a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world's leading experts on Antonych's poetry and an Assistant Professor at Warsaw University.

While Antonych is not a household name in the discourse on Modernism that includes such great Slavic poets as Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, as well as their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, in the opinion of many literary critics, he unquestionably should be. Critics have also compared him to Walt Whitman and to Dylan Thomas. Antonych, who described himself as "an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring," lived, sadly, just for twenty-eight years, dying in 1937 from an infection after an appendectomy. Despite his young age and abbreviated lifespan he managed to create an extremely powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. He was born in the mountainous Lemko region of Poland and grew up speaking the Lemko dialect of Ukrainian as well as Polish. When he moved to the multicultural city of Lviv (known then by its Polish name Lwow) to continue his higher education, he quickly adopted Ukrainian as his literary language and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape.

Only a small amount of Antonych's works has been available in English to date. In 1977 emigre Ukrainian poet Bohdan Boychuk with the American poets Mark Rudman and Paul Nemser translated and published a small, but well-received book of Antonych's selected poems, A Square of Angels. The current edition of ninety-six poems complements that earlier volume with nearly two-thirds of the translations appearing in English for the first time and honors Antonych on the hundred-year anniversary of his birth.