The sea bears, in the rosy flesh of this mussel,
My anguish, scalloped as a wave,
Foam-crested. I am full to the brim
With the memory of cuckoos,
The lament of the breeze in a field in Volhyn.
The sea has not permeated me with salt in vain,
For I will preserve within myself
Perspectives, sadness, that which does not exist.
What is there that is worth dying for?
The voice of a gull warms itself in the boat,
We near the sun-bleached rock, the water
Wrinkles its forehead in righteous anger,
The wind languishes in its own enchantment.
The mussel lies on my table filled with the whisper
Of distant tides. The ships
Drift through me, transparent
As a film of anguish over someone’s eyes.
Mussel
Ihor Pavlyuk
translated from the Ukrainian by Steve Komarnyckyj
Read the original in Ukrainian
Listen to the poem read in the original Ukrianian by the author:
Ihor Pavlyuk was born in the Volyn region of Ukraine in January 1967 and studied at the St. Petersburg Military University, which he left in order to pursue his career as a writer. He was as a result sentenced to a period of hard labour in the Taiga, working on what was literally a road to nowhere. He regained his liberty in the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union. His work has won numerous awards and is marked by a simplicity of diction and an emotional honesty. Translations of his poetry have appeared in Acumen, the Apple Valley Review, Envoi, Barnwood and Zaporogue.
Steve Komarnyckyj is a British Ukrainian writer and linguist whose literary translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Vsesvit (Ukraine's most influential literary journal), The North, Echo Room and Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of selected translations from the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2011 and a translation of Vasyl Shkliar's "Raven" undertaken with Susie Speight was published by Aventura books in April 2013. A first collection of his own poetry will be published in 2013. He is the featured poet in Envoi 163 and along with his partner Susie Speight runs Kalyna Language Press.
