Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow is Natalka Bilotserkivets's first book of selected poems in English translation, published as the eighth volume in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series by Lost Horse Press. Rendered admirably by translators Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Bilotserkivets's poetic voice sounds convincingly strong in translation both in short lyric poems and longer more narrative ones. Rather than to present Bilotserkivets's poetic oeuvre chronologically, the collaborative team of Kinsella and Orlowsky divided the volume into five thematically broad sections, noting that “each section reflects some aspect of Natalka's spiritual journey from despair and a sense of foreboding to acceptance and self-transcendence” (31).
Born in 1954, Bilotserkivets evolved as a poet during a few politically distinct periods: from Brezhnev's stagnation years of the 1970s and early 1980s, through Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, to the period of Ukraine's independence after 1991. Even though her first poetic collection was published in 1976, she belongs to the generation of the eighties (known in Ukrainian as visimdesiatnyky), producing her most memorable poems in that decade. When in 1989 Bilotserkivets published an untitled poem with the now well-known line “we'll not die in Paris I know now for sure” (107), she expressed her generation's despair over the long-kept divide and provincialism imposed on them by the Soviet authorities with regard to western cultural heritage and intimated the implicit longing to be part of Europe. Yet it would be a mistake to read her poetry as overtly political. Being a witness to changing times or to such catastrophes as the Chornobyl nuclear accident have surely affected Bilotserkivets's poetry, but her talent invariably finds a way to express what she has been witnessing in very personal terms. Consider her poem “May” about the Chornobyl disaster: “Yes, we passed through that terrifying spring / of scorching sun and radiant leaves—” (115), yet, at the same time, she cannot stop reflecting on it: “A quiet wind stirs the hair of children and the elderly / and contaminated sleepy forests—/ our ashen-haired homeland / at Europe's breast” (119).
Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow presents the poetry that is erudite, dense, and captivating by its thematic scope. There is an ever-present tension between nature and culture, there are ecological and social concerns, as there are traditionally poetic themes of love (erotic and maternal), pain, and death. Permeating all of that is her extremely keen sense of passing time: “A year of love has passed, / but still the smell of leaves remains the same, / and the glass remains the same. / And soon, another year is already gone” (77). Bilotserkivets thinks in generations: from childhood to youth, from youth to adulthood and then to old age, all these rites of passage are deeply ingrained in her psyche—no wonder she refers to “the vineyards of human time” (53) in one of her poems. She often employs images of storms as symbols of renewal or rejuvenation but hope is rather elusive in the poet's universe. What is also worth noting is her attachment to Kyiv, the place she has lived in her whole adult life—the capital city that has always been alluring culturally, even in the dark days of the Soviet regime (“Jazz”) or economically difficult years of the 1990s (“Love in Kyiv”).
All volumes in the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series are bilingual editions that inevitably invite bilingual readers to compare original versions with their English equivalents. While the overall quality of translation in Eccentric Days is top-notch, there are a few missed opportunities if not outright mistranslations. In the opening poem “Children,” chasy zastoiu is rendered as “times of languor” rather than “times of stagnation,” a choice that dilutes a very specific reference to the period of the 1970s under Brezhnev, known as the era of stagnation. In the poem “Not Everyone Has Returned,” mordovski bolota becomes “Moldovia's mud” instead of “Mordovia's mud,” a republic in Russia known for its forced labor Gulags. In the cycle “Allergy,” Bilotserkivets's reference to Washington, the first president of the United States is mistakenly taken as a reference to the capital city. These very few mistranslations do not mar an otherwise excellent rendition of the important poetic voice of Natalka Bilotserkivets. The book includes a perceptive introduction by Kinsella outlining the poet's biographical and literary details, a Translator's Note by Orlowsky commenting on her personal connection to Natalka's poetry, as well as a thoughtful Afterword by the L΄viv poet and literary critic Iryna Starovoit.
