Vasyl Stus “Cannibals”

Tags

василь стус

How hard it is to keep faith in the good,
how frightening to confess that a human being
is not yet dead inside us. And how frightening it is
to wait until it dies buried deep inside,
so that we can leave it at the cemetery
of souls and gain some comfort
that cannot soothe the wounds.

How tempting evil is. And how luring a crime
to go as far as eyes can see, to flee
and to evade oneself,
like a revolting monster. A shuffling dawn
will enter darkness, look around and waver
because it isn’t worth the trouble:
a tribe of cannibals sits at the fire,
yawns contentedly. Meat is roasting
over the flame. Boiling water
shimmers in the cauldron. They are slurping broth,
and full of philosophic resignation,
consider who is to be roasted next,
so there is enough for lunch and dinner.

Dawn shuffles away, and the fanged
and wrathful cave dusk will never cease
until the last of the cannibals eats himself and dies
with an expression of a real martyr, saying:
Life is so short, yet I ran out of meat.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “The Morning Augury”

Tags

василь стус

This dawn is like an even flare
of a night parachute that opened
and having lost its earthly gravitation,
hangs suspended above the world -
as if it changed its mind, decided to return
upward  (inertia of desire
completely drained this well-rounded flare
of blinded pain). The gray daybreak
has woken me with its disheveled wing,
and life was recollected as a dream.

… somewhere barked a dog, and it seemed that
the scroll of centuries has started to unroll
ever so slowly, and on the Mesolithic coil
it would not ease the linen for a while.
An ebony raven flew spread out
in the earth-ridden boundless sky
and the raven’s aimless flight was meant
to be a presage of apocalypse.

And so it seemed: that the ancestral myth
could no longer convince the soul
that the currents of terror, time and hope
all flow in only one direction.

Whatever the future has concealed from us,
had long been lived through. The future
dwells in the past, right now
but an embroidery of the soul, gone numb.

And then it also seemed, at dawn, as through a blindfold:
that I have lost myself in multitude
of self-multiplication of this world
that gleams through the binoculars of suffering.

My loves, smashed into splinters, each of them
grows spherical, like an eyeball
of someone mad with grief that I
have vanished in a hundred imprints of the world,
deadened and hardened in the trust and thrust
into the abyss.
Like a Neolithic cave,
it roars with darkness,
draws us and repels us.

It was the break of dawn. And glazed with blinding
blue ink of disbelief,
the solid surface of the sky kept silent
as if benumbed; only the raven
kept up his flight and made his rounds,
drilling black holes in universe.

translated by oksana maksymchuk and max popelysh-rosochynsky

Vasyl Stus “The Path of Pain”

Tags

василь стус

St. Sofia’s dome caught a ray of light
and glimmered like a lilac bundle.
You tried to reach me you but did not make it
before the first cry, before the first thunder,

as if the buzz of an infernal mill.
All around are shadows, timid, pale.
I bless your arbitrary will,
the path of fate, the path of pain.

Snows and the frost. Winds, icy beams.
Honks and cries. Curses, like shards.
Hounds barking. Steam-locomotives scream.
Trains packed with convicts, and convict-packed cars.

Crossroads and soldiers, spotlights and dogs.
Bars and barbed wire, and small enclosures.
Fell down – now go. Got up – now go.
Machine guns pressing into our shoulders.

A square heart is trapped in a square circle’s rim.
In a deadly quadrille we’ll fall one day.
I bless your arbitrary whim,
the path of fate, the path of pain.

At the crossroads of terror and hate,
with the enlightenment of the last weep,
do not let me disgrace myself,
give an honorable countenance to me.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “Using One’s Voice”

Tags

василь стус

The voice reaches for the spheres
and tints the porcelain
of gloomy skies in an attempt to bring to life
the infinite eyes and shrieks, long dead,
with a wing of butterfly.

Leave it to the worlds
to feebly strive toward eternity,
to end their course.

When the gathered fingertips of a praying child
solidify into a star, the hardened spirit will emerge
in the enormity of emptiness.
A tear will calcify into a star.

A see-through wing of a butterfly resounds
with long-forgotten singing.
Await yourself.
Sometime.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “The Kingdom”

Tags

василь стус

And still I have not grasped,
and still I do not see
if world is passing me
or somehow I went past.

The past began to spark
and glimmer, like a dream.
And the important dates
someone has marked for me.

The world is full of hopes -
a pond that does not crease.
This kingdom will pass with
no punishments or oaths.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “Messages to my Son”

Tags

василь стус

I look at you – and I don’t recognize you:
you, tell me, is this you, my dear son?
You, little one, before whom I am bound
to feel the guiltless guilt – the one I know
to hide even from myself? The words
I meant to tell you all escape me now.
And in delirium I vow: this will of God
I take upon my shoulders, like a cross.

The past is like a star, its rays are needles.
They burn me through the sleepless nights,
when evil phantoms crowd the mind
and an insatiable vacuum feeds on
the soul (in our village, where dreams have flowed
like rivers, the initial foreboding
was torturing the soul. The hurried and unfolding
delays of fatherland, long lost).

Smeared with salt, the Milky Way lay aurous.
Smeared with salt, that Milky Way of ours
with thorns of constellations burned and beamed,
and I, barely believing, still believed
the muddled fear would not overcome
the ancient labors. Heaps of years now
piled up all straight, would shift our heavy weight.
The insults’ weave would break,
and blood and sweat would dew on our brow.

The path to Golgotha does not bear a sign.
So know yourself in the smog of clashing wills
and choose, while we are destined, still
to walk the path of tongueless tears to the finish.

I am in the heart of hearts. The heart of hearts I am.
How strangely lucid  - in all four directions.
The deaf-mute streams have burst in, and impetuously
the current raises its sharp-stranded mane.
In darkness it is forgivable to go blind,
to grow deaf in this shrieking, thick and bold.
World undergoes creation at death’s threshold;
it barely appears – then it’s out.

My way is hard. But you shall conquer height.
Enter this circle when I disappear.
Forgive me that it is empty, that it is bare.
Forgive me that we did not win the fight.
World undergoes creation at the threshold.
There all the wills come clashing in a strife.
I am in the heart of hearts. In the heart of hearts. And I
send you a greeting out of pallid cold.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “Alcohol of Agony”

Tags

василь стус

This pain – the alcohol of agony,
this sorrow, frozen up and stiff.
Try to retype all of your curses,
try to rewrite the grief.

We’ve long forgotten what it means to live,
and what is world, and what are we ourselves.
To enter one’s own body still
is granted but to the insane.

So faced with the Satan-worthy choice,
the maddening choice, hold on until
it’s time to go, feeling your footsteps
upon your graying hair.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “Irreversible”

Tags

василь стус

The irreversible has already happened.
А smile still wanders about the face,
as if a bird who, sitting on a branch,
is sensing danger but despite this
delays his flight. The azure bell
is humming with a high cool call,
and yet the crevices are getting wider,
the heart is twitching in the chest,
as if a tongue of that azure bell,
both of them ill. The garden blossoms still,
the voices of the birds are drunk and shrill,
but something has already happened.

Irreversible, it hurries to my home,
a heavy cloud. Soon there will be thunder,
and rain, and hail, and flares of static,
dense, as those early-summer buds.
And there will be something else. There will be. Day
stands tall, like a television tower -
and it keeps rising, thin as a needle
about to spit out an astringent tear.
Then it will drip, it will collapse and bury
its palms and knees deep in the soil
under the weight of my foreboding, for
the irreversible has happened already.

translated by oksana maksymchuk

Vasyl Stus “The Ship”

Tags

аскольд мельничук, василь стус

This ship was made from human beings.
Everything: deck, hold, masts,
even the machines.
The siding was a pain:
holes mended with heads
waterlogged.
Leaks were fixed
with bodies of those aboard,
while the remaining crew and passengers
searched for an harbor
in the open sea.

translated by oksana maksymchuk and askold melnyczuk

Vasyl Stus “The Bald Mountain”

Tags

аскольд мельничук, василь стус

Upon the Bald Mountain the fires are dying out,
and autumn leaves burn in quiet on the Bald Mountain.
Now I have forgotten where it is, and I doubt it
that the Bald Mountain would recognize me now.

Evening time, you are a time of delicate partings!
And I do not know, do not know, do not know anymore
if I am alive, if I am dead, if I am dying alive, because all
thundered away, dimmed, and played out around me.

And you above mindlessness soar - like a bird -
above our mindlessness, shared and universal.
Forgive me. No more. I don’t know why it burst out.
If only you knew, how much you still hurt…

And up to this day I keep feeling the sorrowful palms,
lips bitter with tears. The wind forces forward
a shadow, your shadow, a small startled bird,
and dully, like blood in aortas, the nightingales’ thunder abounds.

translated by oksana maksymchuk and askold melnyczuk