Oleh Lysheha
Encyclopedia
Oleh Lysheha is a Ukrainian
poet
, playwright
, translator and intellectual
. Lysheha entered Lviv University
in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an "unofficial" literary circle, Lviv Bohema. As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army
and internally exiled. During the period 1972-1988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge (Velykyi Mist) was published. For "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," Lysheha and his co-translator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
. Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.
, a Carpathian
village in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast
, Ukraine
. Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the university in Lviv
named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko
. In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University. After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birth place, working at a local factory.
In due time, Lysheha returned to Lviv, and soon thereafter moved to Kiev
(Kyiv) where he married. In his position as a technical employee at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute of Karpenko Karyi, Lysheha continued to write poems and translate. From 1997-1998, Oleh Lysheha was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar
to Penn State in Pennsylvania
, United States
. After his return to Ukraine, the poet dove into a prolific artistic labor of poetry, painting and sculpture, as well as resumed his seasonal alteration between the capital and his birth home in the Carpathian mountains.
Andriy Bondar describes Lysheha as the Ukrainian Henry Thoreau of the beginning of the 21st century:
Another artistic corner of Lysheha's contributions lies in the translation field. He has translated into the Ukrainian language
works by T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound
. Lysheha is also the co-author of a book of translations from Chinese, "The Stories of Ancient China."
describes the poet's work as "informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like
introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature."
Whatever the style, Lysheha and Brasfield received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. A presentation of the award was held May 15 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
in New York City
. The poems were selected by Lysheha himself and follow the trajectory of his career. The book is divided into three parts. Section one holds shorter poems. Section two "is a witty, brief, three-act play mostly in prose, Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu." The third section consists of longer and more discursive narrative poems.
Bear (Vedmid)
In 2003 Virlana Tkacz staged “Swan” as a full production at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York with Yara artists Andrew Colteaux and Soomi Kim. Music was by Paul Brantley, design by Watoku Ueno and video by Andrea Odezynska. The critic for the Village Voice wrote: “Andrew Colteaux's vibrant performance as the poem's voice integrated speaking and movement, charting a landscape of loneliness, yearning, and ultimate surrender.”
Yara’s production of “Swan,” performed at Harvard afterwards. Critic Dzvinka Matiash, who wrote in Kyiv’s Komentar: “The production of Swan is a virtuoso translation of Lysheha’s text – it is not simply a literary translation into English, but rather a translation of poetry into the languages of music, light, image, movement of the human body, human voice…. This is what art should be like – in the glare of the stage lights you suddenly see the essence. But you can only catch a glimpse of it, just as you can only glimpse the swan in this show.”
Tkacz and Phipps translations of Lysheha work have been published in the journals Index on Censorship, Visions International, in the anthologies One Hundred Years of Youth and In a Different Light and on the Poetry International and Yara Arts Group websites.
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, translator and intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
. Lysheha entered Lviv University
Lviv University
The Lviv University or officially the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv is the oldest continuously operating university in Ukraine...
in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an "unofficial" literary circle, Lviv Bohema. As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
and internally exiled. During the period 1972-1988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge (Velykyi Mist) was published. For "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," Lysheha and his co-translator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation honors a poetry translation published in the preceding year.The award is separate from the similar PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.-Winners:-See also:*American poetry*List of poetry awards...
published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute is a research institute affiliated with Harvard University devoted to Ukrainian studies studying the history, culture, language, and politics of Ukraine. Other areas of study include Ukrainian literature, archaeology, art, economics, and anthropology...
. Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.
Life
Oleh Lysheha was born in 1949 to a family of teachers in TysmenytsiaTysmenytsia
Tysmenytsia is a city, the administrative center of the Tysmenytsia Raion in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast of western Ukraine. In 1900 as part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Tysmenytsia was in Tłumacz powiat.-Overview:...
, a Carpathian
Carpathian Mountains
The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians are a range of mountains forming an arc roughly long across Central and Eastern Europe, making them the second-longest mountain range in Europe...
village in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast
Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast
Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is an oblast in western Ukraine. Its administrative center is the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. As is the case with most other oblasts of Ukraine this region has the same name as its administrative center – which was renamed by the Soviets after the Ukrainian writer, nationalist...
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the university in Lviv
Lviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...
named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko
Ivan Franko
Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language....
. In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University. After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birth place, working at a local factory.
In due time, Lysheha returned to Lviv, and soon thereafter moved to Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
(Kyiv) where he married. In his position as a technical employee at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute of Karpenko Karyi, Lysheha continued to write poems and translate. From 1997-1998, Oleh Lysheha was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
to Penn State in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. After his return to Ukraine, the poet dove into a prolific artistic labor of poetry, painting and sculpture, as well as resumed his seasonal alteration between the capital and his birth home in the Carpathian mountains.
Andriy Bondar describes Lysheha as the Ukrainian Henry Thoreau of the beginning of the 21st century:
Poems and translations
At the age of forty, Lysheha published his first collection of poems - "Great Bridge" (1989), a book which placed him at the forefront of the Ukrainian poetic community. Years later, after meeting his future co-translator James Brasfield, Lysheha published "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" (1999) making his work available for the first time to the English reader. A masterpiece of Ukrainian drama is Oleh Lysheha's miracle play "Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu" included in the second section of the 1999 English publication. Thirteen years after his first work, Lysheha published "To Snow and Fire" (2002).Another artistic corner of Lysheha's contributions lies in the translation field. He has translated into the Ukrainian language
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
works by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. Lysheha is also the co-author of a book of translations from Chinese, "The Stories of Ancient China."
The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (1999)
Literary reviewers have written that "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" - the English translations of Lysheha - have nothing in common with the Ukrainian poetic tradition. As Bondar, for example, notes the poetry is "influenced by natural philosophy, shamanistic meditation, total denial of a technocratic world, and escapism." Lyshaha's publisher Harvard University PressHarvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...
describes the poet's work as "informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature."
Whatever the style, Lysheha and Brasfield received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. A presentation of the award was held May 15 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of New York City's Upper West Side. Reynold Levy has been its president since 2002.-History and facilities:...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. The poems were selected by Lysheha himself and follow the trajectory of his career. The book is divided into three parts. Section one holds shorter poems. Section two "is a witty, brief, three-act play mostly in prose, Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu." The third section consists of longer and more discursive narrative poems.
Example of poetry
After dining in the moonlight, He sorted the bones — The small and the larger separated accurately On ground that was still warm — What if someone should come along and decide To carve a hole in one |
And make a flute.. To greet the dawn.. Otherwise things were the same — The wild garlic was growing darker, the blackberries were filling out.. And his paw was still strong enough, To protect the night.. |
|
| — Oleh Lysheha, 1997 | ||
Yara Arts Group
Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps started translating Oleh Lysheha’s work in 1991 when Yara Arts Group performed bilingual versions of his poems “Song 212” and “Song 2” at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York. That summer Virlana staged Lysheha’s prose poem “Mountain” at Yara’s Theatre Workshop at Harvard . For several years in Harvard’s summer workshops she staged fragments from Lysheha’s play “Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu,” his poems ”Swan,” “Bear” and “De Luminis” from “Adamo et Diana.” In 1998 Yara presented “A Celebration of the Poetry of Oleh Lysheha.”In 2003 Virlana Tkacz staged “Swan” as a full production at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York with Yara artists Andrew Colteaux and Soomi Kim. Music was by Paul Brantley, design by Watoku Ueno and video by Andrea Odezynska. The critic for the Village Voice wrote: “Andrew Colteaux's vibrant performance as the poem's voice integrated speaking and movement, charting a landscape of loneliness, yearning, and ultimate surrender.”
Yara’s production of “Swan,” performed at Harvard afterwards. Critic Dzvinka Matiash, who wrote in Kyiv’s Komentar: “The production of Swan is a virtuoso translation of Lysheha’s text – it is not simply a literary translation into English, but rather a translation of poetry into the languages of music, light, image, movement of the human body, human voice…. This is what art should be like – in the glare of the stage lights you suddenly see the essence. But you can only catch a glimpse of it, just as you can only glimpse the swan in this show.”
Tkacz and Phipps translations of Lysheha work have been published in the journals Index on Censorship, Visions International, in the anthologies One Hundred Years of Youth and In a Different Light and on the Poetry International and Yara Arts Group websites.