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. In light of the complexity of both the poetry itself and the editors’ ambitious enterprise, such an amount of accompanying materials is definitely welcome. Mykola Bazhan (1904–1983) is one of the top names in the canon of twentieth-century Ukrainian literature, but his poetry is far from having been analyzed in as much depth as it deserves. A certain degree of uneasiness in dealing with his biography and his literary legacy has its roots both in his participation in the Soviet establishment from the 1930s until his death on the eve of perestroika and in the difficulty of his poetry, which, while relentlessly dedicated to language experiment, drew on such sources as German Romanticism and the history and myth of Ukrainian Cossackdom.
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. Another remarkable feature of this volume is the diversity of its international team of nineteen contributors, including senior scholars such as George G. Grabowicz from Harvard University and Eleonora Solovey from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, graduate students and mid-career literary scholars. The language competences and scholarly interests of the contributors are fascinatingly diverse; nonetheless, the coherence of the volume testifies to the high degree of collaboration between them. Among the most intriguing pages of the book are those dedicated to the translators’ remarks about their work, the exchanges between them, their different goals and strategies in translating and the problems they encountered. One might say that the volume reads like the account of an intense translation workshop, with translators openly sharing with readers the different choices that accompanied their encounter with Bazhan and his rebirth in English. In a way, the book recreates that ostranenie, that defamiliarizing strategy so central to Bazhan's poetry that Halyna Babak does not fail to highlight in her introduction. It should also be noted that the basic information provided alongside more sophisticated interpretations makes the book accessible to readers not well acquainted with Ukrainian literature. One hopes that, in the context of the current interest in Ukraine and its culture sparked by the Russian aggression against it, this feature will support the book's dissemination.
In her introduction, Halyna Babak, a scholar of Ukrainian formalism, stresses the proximity of Bazhan's poetry to that of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. She also foregrounds the importance in Bazhan's writing of baroque aesthetics, a key trend throughout twentieth-century Ukrainian literature. In her translator's essay, Amelia M. Glaser aptly points out “Bazhan's resistance to categorization” (17)—which does not prevent her from stressing his closeness to Acmeism— which emerges in his passion for the material side of the world; for things and the many ways they become accessible to the senses. All these elements contribute to the complexity of translating Bazhan's poetry and the variety of approaches that can be used, two things that the book shows very well. Quiet Spiders also features early short poems from Bazhan's futurist beginnings that were excluded from standard Soviet collections, an important element that testifies to the textological value of the book. The largest section of the book is dedicated to “Blind Bards,” a long and extremely complex poem centered around the bard, one of the key figures of Ukrainian culture, translated and with a commentary by George Grabowicz. The final section of the book presents some archival materials, including Omeljan Pritsak's letter to the Nobel Committee about Bazhan, one of a number of attempts to nominate a Ukrainian writer for the Nobel Prize.
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.
