by Vasyl Stus
Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Julius Kochan // 29 листопада 2023 р. в журналі "apofenie" опубліковано переклади на англійську з циклу "Рінь" та вірш "Рятуючись од сумнівів..."
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When after the thousands of years of travelling the stars reach Earth — I don’t envy them.
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If your heart hurts — you are lucky, my friend.
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I vote with both hands for all of the resolutions of the Party — for at least fifty years in advance.
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It is not very humble to shout about the immortality of our ancestors. For we know full well what they would do without us.
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When humanity develops planet-wide patriotism will chauvinism be no more?
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In the era of the extensive construction of communism we are being watched by Mesozoic stars.
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If someone had given Stalin’s moustache a timely shaving then the genius would’ve looked like a weasel.
If light travelled at the speed of 300 000 kilometres per second every beam would look like a morning glory.
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It is easier to walk around the Botanical Gardens in Kyiv than around oneself — from head to toe.
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If people carry on writing books for another couple of centuries then what will our descendants do?
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What taught people to sharpen knives was screams.
Гострити ніж Людей научили зойки.
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Houses are philosophers! The wisest philosophers. Always silent.
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They say: coal is black gold. That is if you forget about pollution and sciatica.
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Every hangman loves a glass of red wine warmed up to 36°.
“IN AN ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE MY DOUBTS”
In an attempt to escape my doubts, I tap out a telegram to myself: attheverytimewhenallthesovietpeople andallprogressivehumanityaregettingproperlyready forthenextcongressofthecommunistpartyoftheussr I wish you the greatest of successes I sincerely envy that for more than thirty years now you have been living in the happiest country in the world.
And yet my disappointment does not go away. So then I make myself remember that the international situation today is more complicated than ever, and I feel calmer.
Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) was one of Ukraine’s most significant twentieth-century poets, a prose writer, essayist and prolific translator from several languages. As a Ukrainian dissident in the Soviet Union, he spent the last thirteen years of his life in the Gulag, where he wrote his magnum opus collection Palimpsests (1980). His other poetry collections include Winter Trees (1970), Joyful Cemetery (1970), and Time of Creativity/Dichtenszeit (1972).
Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar and translator specializing in Ukraine’s twentieth-century and contemporary literature, currently based at the University of Potsdam (EUTIM project). He completed his PhD on the works of Vasyl Stus at the University of Cambridge and is currently finishing his monograph on Stus’s poetry. His translations have appeared in literary magazines such as Asymptote and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Julius Kochan is a PhD student in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. His academic background is in Slavonic Studies, and he is interested in parallels between the arts, cultures, and histories of the Slavonic and Sinophone worlds. Alongside this, he is a translator of literary and academic texts.
