When I am half a breath off from your lips,
When I am half a step away from you —
Your pupils are all woven out of wonder
And in your eyes, it’s all boundless and blue.
You whisper something quiet and bewitched.
That whisper bluely cuts my quiet through
And I forget that I know how to breathe,
And I forget my feet can walk to you.
Your eyelids’ raven rises black in flight
And whisks my confidence somewhere remote,
Now half a step is left behind unwalked
And half a breath is stuck here in my throat.
Your pupils are all woven out of wonder
And in your eyes it’s all boundless and blue
But there is half a breath left to your lips
And half a step left from my lips to you.
~ ~ ~
The Original:
Коли до губ твоїх
Коли до губ твоїх лишається півподиху,
Коли до губ твоїх лишається півкроку –
Зіниці твої виткані із подиву,
В очах у тебе синьо і широко.
Щось шепчеш зачаровано і тихо ти,
Той шепіт мою тишу синьо крає.
І забуваю я, що вмію дихати,
І що ходити вмію, забуваю.
А чорний птах повік твоїх здіймається
І впевненість мою кудись відмає.
Неступленим півкроку залишається,
Півподиху у горлі застрягає.
Зіниці твої виткані із подиву,
В очах у тебе синьо і широко,
Але до губ твоїх лишається півподиху,
До губ твоїх лишається півкроку
Hryhoriy Chubay (1949, Bereziny – 1982, Lviv) was a Ukrainian poet and translator, one of the most prominent representatives of the Lviv underground of the 1970s. In his lifetime, he published only in samizdat and abroad. Posthumously, his poetry books To Speak, to Be Silent and to Speak Again (1990), Crying of Jeremiah (1999) were published in Ukraine. He translated poetry from Spanish, Polish, Czech and Russian.
Alex Foreman (aka A.Z. Foreman) is a linguist and translator of poetry from Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, Greek, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Serbian, Russian, Romanian, Romani, Ugaritic, Ukrainian, Urdu, Welsh, and Yiddish.
A blog of his translations: https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/p/my-poetry-translations.html
Sailor, artist, lawyer, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was one of a team of Soviet spies operating in the West between the World Wars. He seduced women to learn great secrets of foreign states, but was then arrested and tortured in the Gulag, where he began to document the crimes against humanity of the regime he had served.
This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing with the effect of the war on their lives.
The first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past.
