I keep returning to the meeting with Natalka Bilotserkivets last week... She told the audience she liked reading J.M. Coetzee, especially his novel Disgrace. I started reading it in English and in the very first chapter stumbled on such a phrase: "A ready learner, compliant, pliant." This poetic ending - "compliant, pliant" - at once reminded me of Bilotserkivets’s line ending "затихала стихала" [zatykhála stykhála] ("passed grew quiet" in Dzvinia Orlowsky's translation) from one of her most famous poems “We’ll Not Die in Paris” to a degree that for me these two words following one another in English and Ukrainian boil down to almost one and the same thing, a translation. I mean, it’s not a literal translation; it’s the rhythm of both line endings that unites them. The simple reduction of a first syllable producing another word with the almost same and yet slightly another meaning is what unites them. They’re beautiful: in both languages. That’s a translation of beauty. (And if Coetzee describes woman with these words, Bilotserkivets describes spring.)
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And here’s the whole poem:
NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS
WE’LL NOT DIE IN PARIS
I will die in Paris on Thursday evening.
—César Vallejo
You forget the lines smells colors and sounds
sight weakens hearing fades simple pleasures pass
you lift your face and hands toward your soul
but to high and unreachable summits it soars
what remains is only the depot the last stop
the gray foam of goodbyes lathers and swells
already it washes over my naked palms
its awful sweet warmth seeps into my mouth
love alone remains though better off gone
in a provincial bed I cried till exhausted
through the window a scraggly rose-colored lilac spied
the train moved on spent lovers stared
at the dirty shelf heaving beneath your flesh
outside a depot's spring passed grew quiet
we'll not die in Paris I know now for sure
but in a sweat and tear-stained provincial bed
no one will serve us our cognac I know
we won't be saved by kisses
under the Pont Mirabeau murky circles won't fade
too bitter we cried abused nature
we loved too fiercely
our lovers shamed
too many poems we wrote
disregarding poets
they'll not let us die in Paris
and the alluring water
under the Pont Mirabeau
will be encircled with barricades
Translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky
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