Stephen Komarnyckyj

Steve Komarnyckyj is a poet and PEN award winning literary translator who runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie, five cats and his dog. His first book of original poetry "The August Rain" was described as "the articulation of what it means to be human"

by poet and BBC broadcaster Sean Street. The book mixes nature poetry with musings on a German heavy metal gig involving a cement mixer painted to look like a vast penis. His literary translation projects include the crazy Ukrainian novel "Kaharlyk" which began life as a series of posts on facebook. This deranged novel is written entirely in blocks of 100 words and has been described as "hologrammatic" by Andrei Kurkov. Steve's literary translation work has featured in Index on Censorship, The Guardian and Modern Poetry in Translation. He is passionate about securing a wider audience for Ukrainian literature. Here are some samples of his work:

Tickling

My father, with his trousers rolled up to his knee,

Stood in the beck, in peat-stained water

That was the gold orange of a delicate tea,

Though curious frills of lace and snow

Bloomed over the stones nearby

And his feet were either bronze or ivory.

It was not those that took me, but his face,

The face of a young man glazed with sunlight,

Stooped over the stream, his gaze

At once enraptured and predatory

And then the trout quite still in his hand.

In dreams he shows me, there is no sound

As he lowers the trout back into the water.

We watch it flex, balance and float,

Curved to a Circassian dagger

Thrust in the river’s throat,

And the sand and stones of the river bed

And the water rusted as old blood.

From "The August Rain"

Duet

We return slowly to the earth, our cradle.

Green tangles of vegetation bind us, two fettered chords.

The razor sharp axe of sun hews at a trunk,

The music of moss, tenderness of the breeze, the oak a proud idol.

In the wastage of days that bear us the body, warm and obedient

Grows with itself, two siblings, two flowers of fidelity.

The moss warms us like cat fur. You transform the stars into a murmur

And blood into music and greenery. The sky glows.

At the edge of day, in the ocean of heaven, the winds of the future sleep

And our devoted constellations wait under the frost,

While earth does not instruct them to arise. We abandon things,

To be borne, to grasp the stars in pure ecstasy.

The yearning of blood hurts. Eyebrows sharp as two arrows,

While above us a wall of melody echoes

The pinions of a breeze. Our fate pinned on the planets.

You burn with growth, thirsty as the earth. Become all music.

From the PEN award winning "Night Music" by Bohdan Ihor Antonych translated by Stephen Komarnyckyj