New Release: "The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies" (Translated by Michael M. Naydan)

This volume gathers together translations of the best works from all six of the extraordinary extant collections by Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych's (1909-37): A Greeting to Life (1931), The Grand Harmony (1932-33), Three Rings (1934), The Book of the Lion (1936), The Green Gospel (1938), and Rotations (1938), as well as poetry published separately. It includes a translator's note and a biographical sketch on the poet by Michael M. Naydan and a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world's leading experts on Antonych's poetry and an Assistant Professor at Warsaw University.


About the author:

While Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) is not a household name in the discourse on Modernism that includes such great Slavic poets as Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, as well as their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, in the opinion of many literary critics, he unquestionably should be. Critics have also compared him to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. Antonych, who described himself as "an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring," lived, sadly, just for twenty-eight years, dying in 1937 from an infection after an appendectomy. Despite his young age and abbreviated lifespan, he managed to create an extremely powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. When he moved to the multicultural city of Lviv to continue his higher education, he quickly adopted Ukrainian as his literary language and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape.

About the translator:

Michael M. Naydan is Woksob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and a prolific translator from Ukrainian and Russian. He has published seventeen books of translations, over thirty articles and more than fifty translations in scholarly and literary journals. Among his publications are: The Poetry of Lina Kostenko: Wanderings of the Heart (1990); Marina Tsvetaeva's "After Russia" (1992); Igor Klekh, A Country the Size of Binoculars (2004); Yuri Andrukhovych, Perverzion (2005); and Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, The Grand Harmony (2007).

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