Three Poems by Yuri Andrukhovych

By Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy

Dr. Dutka, Ph.D.

Dr. Dutka, who knew nineteen languages
(and with dialects, spoke twenty-four),
reflected the entire world, like an ancient mirror,
and sued his grandchildren for apartment space.

Dr. Dutka, who had five fabulous rooms
next door to the proprietor of the shoe store,
was embedded in the building like an Atlante
with a white beard like Hrushevsky.

Dr. Dutka, who lived among richly smelling dictionaries,
had a balcony overlooking the garden, lilacs, dampness,
and sweet grass full of living slugs.
Dr. Dutka loved Solitude like a woman.

A little later, on the slope of wasted years,
he ended up as helpless as a bird in a bag.
That’s when he felt the radiance on his forehead
and slept behind a curtain like an angel on nails.

And the chairs and china cabinet cracked,
the ancient walnut pieces were last to dry out.
So many black stockings, hats, and fleas!
Ash fell from books, stuck to his soles,

words followed the wind, flying into oblivion,
the cisterns of his speech began to leak,
but his old head shone like a chandelier,
and an amaryllis, domestic devil, rustled.

In the end, the judges said the case was groundless.
Scraps of the words he uttered and let loose
are swirling around the hospital still, trying
to rescue him—full of Assyrian sounds, maybe.

Wolf Messing. Pigeon Expulsion

I had a startling gift (or else a disease):
two pigeons nesting in my brain box.
Doctors, psychics, and other wiseguys peered
down my pie-hole, purple from screaming.

How proud of you I was, my winged gems,
my feathered tormentors from ancient paintings!
All summer, they caressed me with their wings and cooed,
founding the town of Cooville in my skull.

And an illusionist fell from the sky in the fall.
He listened to me with a stethoscope—how they crackled there,
almost half the city had gathered to watch.
And then I was enlightened: "They want to fly."

They flew out of my head through a hole in the wound,
or through my third eye (no way to close it).
That scrawny dog had a Browning in his pocket
and he killed two pigeons with one bullet.

I was completely at peace, found my quiet place,
an exemplar of sanity—always polite and graceful.
Not because my sweet birds were murdered,
but because I carried their warm egg in my skull. 

Untitled

Painting a cross at the cemetery in spring,
where dandelions sprout from graves, bumblebees buzz tulips,
where a small stone goddess silently plays the zither
above the green fire reviving from the earth,

where an airplane flies above us, and a titmouse sways                                           
a supple branch of lilac, spreading scent and quivering.
The sweet cities of burial. The past flowering
from the depths. The underground river 

that emerges into the world with the odor of decaying stems
(the spice of varnish and dew drifts from a cross).
So, those who’ve passed on courteously pave us
earthly paths. Their depth? Their height?

And their semaphore-like candle burns green,
and a small airplane drinks the dense sky.
Not a word about death—it’s just a form
with an eternal meaning: life
                                              and bumblebees,
                                                             and dew.

 

About the authors:

Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian poet who has published more than a dozen poetry collections, fiction books, and collections of essays, and his work has been translated into many languages. A recipient of various awards including the Herder Prize (2001), the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2005), the Leipzig Book Prize for Understanding (2006), the Angelus Prize (2006), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2014), and the Goethe Medal (2016), Andrukhovych lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk.

John Hennessy is the author of two collections of poems, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims. He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, part of the new Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature (HUP). He is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Ostap Kin is the editor, and co-translator with John Hennessy, of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (forthcoming from Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute), the editor of New York Elegies, and the co-translator, with John Hennessy, of Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, finalist for the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. He co-translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster.