Marko Pavlyshyn - review of Symonenko in Prose and in English
Vasyl Symonenko, Rose Petal Wine. Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuri Tkacz. Melbourne: Bayda Books, 2020, 116 pp. Recommended retail price $17.95 AUD.
If there is one Ukrainian poet’s name that is more closely associated with the term shistdesiatnyky (people of the 60s) than any other, it is that of Vasyl Symonenko. Born in 1935, Symonenko worked as a journalist. His poetic oeuvre was not large, and of the verses that he did write only a sanitised selection could be published in Soviet-occupied Ukraine during his short lifetime – he died in 1963, aged 28, joining a cohort of poets whose luminous talent was extinguished by an untimely death: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Friedrich von Hardenberg and, among Ukrainians, Bohdan Ihor Antonych.
In the West, a volume of his verse – Bereh chekan (Shore of Expectations) was published in 1965. It included several poems that in Ukraine itself could not see the light of day. Some movingly articulated a passionate love for Ukraine quite at odds with the faux internationalism of Soviet culture, as in the memorable lines “Khai movchat Ameryky i Rosii, / Koly ia z toboiu hovoriu” (Let all Americas and Russias fall silent / When I converse with you). Some, like “Zlodii” (The Thief) criticised the Soviet social order which, ostensibly egalitarian, in fact perpetuated a peasant underclass. And a few, like the incendiary “Kurdskomu bratovi” (To my Kurdish brother), under the guise of a satirical attack on colonialism in general expressed outrage at Soviet colonialism in particular.
Like the poetry of his fellow shistdesiatnyky Ivan Drach, Lina Kostenko and Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Symonenko’s verse is at times profoundly lyrical and focussed on subjectivity and emotion, at times infused with civic pathos, even anger. Almost always straightforward and accessible, many of Symonenko’s poems have been put to music. Perhaps the most popular of these settings is “Lebedi materynstva” (Swans of Motherhood), composed by Platon Maiboroda and Anatolii Pashkevych and widely performed both in Ukraine and in the diaspora.
In Australia the community of Ukrainian language writers and other cultural activists paid homage to Symonenko by naming in his honour their organisation, the Vasyl Symonenko Literature and Arts Club.
Remembered first and foremost as a poet, Symonenko also authored a relatively small number of prose works. The majority are miniatures – short stories about young people experiencing in different ways the great adventure of love. They are charming pieces, often enlivened by humour and by the narrator’s affectionately ironic attitude toward his sometimes eccentric characters. Like the 1960s short prose works of Symonenko’s near contemporaries Yevhen Hutsalo and Valerii Shevchuk, these sketches – one is tempted to call them anecdotes – leave to one side the great questions of politics and the social order, preferring to focus warmly and lovingly on the ardours and disappointments, the anxieties and dissimulations, the virtues, vices and quirks of ordinary people as they stumble through their everyday lives.
These stories constitute the bulk of the collection Rose Petal Wine, which Yuri Tkacz has translated with his accustomed keen ear for the idiosyncratic phrase, the unaccustomed formulation and the unexpected intrusion of colloquial diction. The last few pages of the publication contain the diary which Symonenko kept over the last twelve months of his life – a text of great interest, revelatory as it is of solitude that he experienced, both as a person with few strong personal bonds of friendship, and as a writer doomed to exist within the stifling confines of an authoritarian cultural system.
Yuri Tkacz, perhaps the most prolific of literary translators from Ukrainian into English, lives and works in Melbourne. He has translated at least thirty books of Ukrainian literature, most of them twentieth-century prose works, although recently he has also translated Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s drama, Black Panther and Polar Bear (Bayda Books, 2020). In Rose Petal Wine Tkacz has given readers yet another attractive book, worthy of acquaintance for its own sake and as a window into Ukrainian culture in the years of the “Thaw,” as the slight easing of oppressive Soviet policies in the early 1960s came to be known. Tkacz provides a biography of Symonenko and essential contextual information in a brief but useful foreword. The book also, helpfully, contains a select bibliography of translations of Symonenko’s poetry into English.
Emeritus Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, Melbourne