"Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul" - (Ukrainian Studies) by Mykola Bazhan (Paperback)

About the Book

This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection for the first time makes the major works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the most important Ukrainian Modernist poets of the twentieth century, available both to scholars and to the general reader.

Book Synopsis

This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection for the first time makes the major works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the most important Ukrainian Modernist poets of the twentieth century, available both to scholars and to the general reader.

Review Quotes

"Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul is a commendable book in more than one way. First, it provides the international audience with a solid anthology of the early poetry of one of the most complex figures in the history of Ukrainian literature in both the original and English translation. Second, it does so in a way that combines a well thought-out and balanced selection of texts with high-quality translations and, perhaps even more significantly, a wide and accessible apparatus that includes a lengthy introduction, several translators' essays, and an afterword. ... This book is a masterpiece of genre hybridity, an anthology of Bazhan's poetry, including some not easily accessible texts, a collection of translations by various translators, and a series of essays in translation studies. ... One may only wish that other scholars and translators will follow the example of this brave book, in which the desire to spread awareness about the difficult poetry of a major Ukrainian writer is combined with an unusual degree of openness by a team of translators regarding their work and the many challenges that poetry translation entails."

- Alessandro Achilli, University of Cagliari, Slavic Review

"[H]itherto there has never been such an ambitious and comprehensive collection of [Mykola Bazhan's] poetry as [Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul], which is unprecedented in its quality and scope. There are several ways of looking at this exceptional volume. First and foremost, it is a rewarding, idiomatic English-language book of poetry. Second, it is a collection of skillful translations of notoriously difficult texts even in their original Ukrainian. Third, it serves as a useful bilingual anthology that is conducive to the study of a first-rate poet through parallel texts. And fourth, it is a series of short metacommentaries by the translators themselves that help to foreground their craft and lift them from the shadows in which they usually labor. In all these respects, the book is extremely satisfying and will appeal to a diverse readership... As a publication, Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul is uniformly excellent and will delight poetry lovers, not to mention amateur and professional translators. It deserves a place in university literature and translation courses. The entire collective behind this project should be congratulated for making Bazhan accessible to contemporary English and Ukrainian readers alike and creating a lasting tribute to a great if controversial poet."

--Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, University of Alberta, SEEJ

"Despite his stature as a giant of Soviet Ukrainian literature, Bazhan remains all but unknown outside Ukraine. His work is formally sophisticated, his language rich, his subject matter multilayered. Translating him is, thus, no mean feat. But on top of that, for much of the 20th century, Bazhan's pre-Party existence, and thus much of his best work, was unknown or inaccessible to potential translators. It is fitting, then, that the editors of this new volume of Bazhan's work, Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnia, have turned to the poet's earlier poetry. The volume takes us through selections from Bazhan's first three books, published in the giddy experimental atmosphere of the 1920s, before tackling some longer and more formally, thematically, and politically complex works from the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the way it reveals the tension between Bazhan's mercurial, untrammeled poetic genius and the creeping ideological strictures of Stalinism."

--Uilleam Blacker, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The poetry in Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul

About the Author

Mykola Bazhan (1904-1983), one of the most important representatives of Ukrainian literary renaissance of the 1920s, was born into an educated family of Polish-Lithuanian roots in Kamyanets'-Podil's'kyi in Ukraine. Bazhan emerged as a futurist; however, in the 1920s and early 1930s he embraced romantic Expressionism, with frequent references to the turbulence of Ukrainian history. During his extensive career spanning some six decades, Bazhan was prolific as a poet, literary critic, translator, editor, art collector, and a political and cultural figure. Despite the fact that Bazhan not only survived the purges but eventually became an influential political figure, his early works continued to be repressed until the early 1990s.

Oksana Rosenblum is an art historian and translator residing in New York City. Her projects have included visual research for the newly created museums of Jewish History in Warsaw and Moscow. Oksana's poetry translations from Ukrainian and book reviews appeared in Kalyna Review, National Translation Month, and Versopolis.

Lev Fridman is a Speech-Language Pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writings and translations have appeared in Ugly Duckling Press, Odessa Review, and The Café Review. His most recent research has focused on the literary legacy of Mykola Bazhan.

Anzhelika Khyzhnya is a scholar and journalist. She holds an MA in Slavic Languages and Literature, and is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include linguistic aspects of early 19th century Russian and Ukrainian prose, Ukrainian poetry of the 1920s, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts.