Translated by Myrosia Stefaniuk

Ukraine’s battle for sovereignty and freedom from Russian oppression did not start in February 2022, nor in 2014, but has been ongoing for centuries – first from Russian tsars, then from Soviets, and now from Putin. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but Russia’s imperialistic goals lived on, more hidden perhaps, but growing and expanding.  KGB methods and forces continue to use military might and invasion, arrests, poisoning, propaganda, exile to labor camps,  torture, and killing to achieve Russian’s ultimate goal of destroying democracy.

Today, as the world witnesses the unprovoked, heinous attack on Ukraine and the barbaric murdering of its innocent people, the words of Mykola Horbal, poet, musician and human rights activist are as timely as they were decades ago.  

Mykola Horbal, imprisoned for 16 years in Soviet labor camps for his writing, was released from the notorious Perm 36 camp in Siberia in 1985 during perestroika.  Currently, aged 81, he lives in war-ravished Kyiv. His poems, originally printed as samizdat(clandestine) literature were republished in Kyiv, 2008.  Below are several selections of my translation of his book Details of an Hourglass.  Poems from the Gulag.

 

Poetic Reflections from Imprisonment

Surely, you  monsters don’t think
that with lopped off wings
the need to fly vanishes?!

                        …..

Starved for the world,                                                                     
        I shut my ears from myself –
Sorrows clang alarm bells in my head, –
       Nothingness burns with a green flame.
            How to extinguish it?!
                 A black bottom gapes in the cup of anguish.

                        …..

Scrape,
          scrape,
by the light of a wax candle,
     turn a plank board stained by the dying
           into a new
               tabula rasa:
better  late…
      If I steal a cleaver from the butcher
             who peddles hearts by the pound,
then I can carve out
        signs of hope
intertwined with knots
          of barbed wire. 

                        …..

The dream thickens in dense darkness,
Paralysis constricts movement.
Only on knees and elbows
Among the graves. – Where is God’s sepulcher?
       Every night  among the graves
       Seized by graveyard terror.
        Let me have peace, beloved.
       With your absence in dreams.     
Every night through the abyss
The precipices filled with vipers.
Faceless miserable nights
Without flowers, without you, without daylight.

                        …..

Rows of shaven heads
withered dandelions
in squadrons
and in brigades.

Rows.
  Each one is issued a tag
            with his name
and a wooden beam for his head.
      Each one is issued:
                 a name
                      a shaven head
        and a wooden beam.*      

___
*execution block

                        …..

The candles in the fortresses tapered
               and burned out.
     Abandoned strongholds gazed at the world
          through black battlement holes.
On the graves of executed freedom
                nettles grew.
Through the gaping main gate
    the plague of forgetfulness walked out
                    and wandered off aimlessly.

They took turns carrying him
the way they carry little boys on their backs
only this one was over fifty
and had both legs missing.

                        …..

Without a sound Day left us.
        Forever. 
            Finished.
A poplar taper cast shadow apparitions
                   in the sky,
         someone’s lament meandered through the field,
    an orphaned morning whimpered near the cemetery.
               Time shifted,
                     but no one was around.
Only the wet crow’s crackly voice
                     foretold the fate,
      and before dawn someone pounded
              a nail into a wooden board.

                        …..

If we gather all your tears,
all of your laments,
           O Ukraine,
      all your wailing
             and despair,
       your prayers
from all the years
when you endured the Way of the Cross
            throughout your land
and if the heart does not break
from the weight of this burden –
      WE WILL RETURN.

.

.

Translator:
Myrosia Stefaniuk, writer, translator, and educator, was born in Ukraine. Her family fled Soviet-occupied Ukraine when she was a child, lived in Displaced Persons’ camps in Europe for 5 years, and ultimately resettled in the USA. She has travelled to Ukraine several times in past years. Her published works include numerous translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature and her own prose and poetry.