Turning the pages back... July 24, 1907 (07/18/99)

Turning the pages back...

July 24, 1907

Vasyl Mysyk belongs to the highest circle of great translators of world literature into Ukrainian, perhaps a rung below his brilliant junior, Mykola Lukash, but equal to Mykola Bazhan and Maksym Rylsky.

Mysyk was born in Novopavlivka, a village about 50 miles west of Yuzivka (now Donetske), in what is now the Dnipropetrovske Oblast, on July 24, 1907. His secondary school teacher noticed his budding talent and sent off examples of his poetry to Pavlo Tychyna, who saw to it they were published in the journal Chervonyi Shliakh. Mysyk was then 16. In 1924, Tychyna convinced Mysyk to move to Kharkiv, where the Ukrainian literary revival was in full swing, to join the luminaries of what came to be known as "The Fusilladed Renaissance" (Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia).

Drawn to the writers' group Pluh (with Petro Panch, Hryhoriy Epik and Dokia Humenna), he continued his studies at Kharkiv University, at the Technicum for Eastern Studies and the Institute for Foreign Languages. By the time he graduated in 1929, Mysyk had befriended the writer-critic Maik Yohansen, and Mykola Khvyliovy's publishing house, VAPLITE, had published his first collection of poetry, "Travy" (Grasses, 1927).

Mysyk's works appeared twice in the journal that was the exuberant hot-house of Ukraine's best literary talent - Literaturnyi Yarmarok. His first Ukrainian translations to be published were of Aleksandr Pushkin's poetry, which appeared in a collection of the Russian versifier's work edited in the 1920s by the Neoclassicist Pavlo Fylypovych.

From the massist, peasant-oriented group Pluh, Mysyk jumped to the elitist writers' circle, Prolitfront, again pulled by the dynamism of Khvyliovy. He embarked on the translations that would make him great: John Dos Passos's "42nd Parallel," the poetry of Robert Burns, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the Persian classics Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Hafez, Rudaki and Tagore. Mysyk also produced three more poetry collections, "Blakytnyi Mist" (The Azure Bridge, 1929), "Chotyry Vitry" (The Four Winds, 1930), "Turksyb" (1932) and "Budivnyky" (The Builders, 1933); and a collection of short stories, "Galaganiv Son" (Galagan's Dream, 1930).

In 1931, Mysyk embarked on a trip to the Soviet eastern republics, Tajikistan and Kazakstan, and returned with a readiness to render the material he gathered there, but he also found the Stalinist noose tightening around the Ukrainian intellectual milieu, and the hammer of genocidal famine about to descend on the heartland he came from.

By May 1933, the time of Khvyliovy's suicide, his world had fallen apart. The poet-translator found he was unable to "restructure" himself (the word "perebudova" had a more sinister currency in the 1930s) as his mentor, Tychyna did. In December 1934 he was arrested and imprisoned in a distant Arctic concentration camp. Somehow, Mysyk was spared amidst the wave of executions that claimed so many of his contemporaries in the fall of 1937. In late 1941 he was pressed into a front-line punitive battalion thrown against the invading Nazis, and months later was taken prisoner, now suffering at a different oppressor's hand, and languished in a POW camp in Germany until 1945.

At war's end Mysyk managed to return to his native Dnipropetrovske region and worked as an accountant until 1956, when as a result of the partial thaw of the Khrushchev years, he was "rehabilitated." It took him only two years to pick up where he left off. Invigorated by his encounter with Lukash, by 1958 he completed a volume of translations of Burns' poetry. Through the 1960s and '70s he tackled Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens," completed a version of Omar Khayyam's "Rubayat," translated John Keats "Selected Poems," and produced renderings of works by John Milton, Byron, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre-Jean Beranger, Walt Whitman, Joe Wallace, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Persians Saadi, Busti, Ibn Sina, Djami and Firdousi.

He returned to the works of Tajik poets, translated from Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Georgian and modern Greek, and wrote another five collections of poetry: "Borozny" (Furrows, 1962), "Verkhovittia" (Top Branches, 1963), "Chornotrop" (The Snow-Free Way, 1966), "Lan" (Farmland, 1970) and "Bereh" (The Shore, 1972). In 1977 he was awarded the Maksym Rylsky Prize in Ukrainian Literature.

Vasyl Mysyk died on March 3, 1983 in Kharkiv.

Sources: "Mysyk, Vasyl," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); "Mysyk, Vasyl," Ukrainska Literaturna Entsyklopediya, Vol. 3 (Kyiv: URE, 1994); Hryhoriy Kostiuk, "Spomyn pro Vasylia Mysyka" Suchasnist, No. 6, 1965.

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