“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 edited by Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnia, spans the years from 1926-1931. The poems in the book begin shortly after Mykola Bazhan’s publishing debut in Ukraine in 1923, encompassing his early experimental works. They reach into a collective history and dig through its secrets. Mykola Bazhan himself was a kind of secret, many of his poems were lost and many more were never translated. In this book, the editors chose various translators to render the work into English. … This book digs through the work of Bazhan and sees what is behind the rhyme. There is more to Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul than meets the eye. Readers too are invited to dig through the texts, to unleash Bazhan’s memory as well as their own.”
—Olena Jennings, Reading in Translation
“Mykola Bazhan is a great twentieth-century poet who still remains largely unfamiliar to the English-language reader. This masterfully edited collection for the first time presents translations of his early poetry, the most innovative and powerful. By providing the original Ukrainian text alongside the translations, the editors allow readers of Ukrainian to access the poems, some of which were never allowed publication in the Soviet Union or were quickly removed from the accepted canon after their initial appearance.
Bazhan by his own admission favoured ‘organic, robust culture’ and avoided the conventional, saccharine and insipid. His work is muscular and crafted, and he chose controversial themes: violence, colonialism, wrenching change, and the burden of memory. He had an intense interest in futurism, the transformation of tradition, and the culture of Ukraine’s Jews. Having grown up in Kamianets-Podilsk and Uman, and having witnessed the political passions and revolutionary upheavals of the century’s second and third decades, he felt compelled to produce work that integrated clashing perspectives, introduced new rhythms and unexpected diction. Above all, his poetry is a meditation on Ukrainian culture and identity, Eastern and Western, from the baroque to the modern.
This volume is a labor of love by a team of translators, several of whom provide short essays describing their experience working on the translation. It also includes analytical pieces by leading scholars of poet’s life and work. Altogether, the book constitutes a remarkable achievement by a group that has long admired Bazhan’s work and recognized the importance of introducing him to a broader public.”
—Myroslav Shkandrij, Professor Emeritus, University of Manitoba
“Kudos to the editors for embarking on this challenging and overdue task, for developing a format fitting for the undertaking, and for assembling a team capable of bringing it to fruition. The legendary complexity of Mykola Bazhan’s poetry—his Avant-Garde experiments and his equally jarring Baroque Expressionism, his mastery of both short and long forms—and his sometimes controversial yet undeniably vital place in literature of the twentieth century, are all carefully approached and presented in this volume. The book’s scholarly texts help to position Bazhan within the literary and political currents of that century while its translators’ essays offer the reader fascinating and elucidating peeks into the various strategies engaged in transporting these literary works into English. By providing a sampling of the writer’s best texts, including several that were rarely published in the original Ukrainian, Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul compellingly unleashes Bazhan’s word-ghosts unto the twenty-first century world.”
—Mark Andryczyk, Associate Research Scholar, Ukrainian Studies Program, Harriman Institute, Columbia University
“The editors have not only assembled a marvelous group of translators who capture the nuances of Bazhan’s complex poetry in genuinely poetic English, but they have also supplemented the texts with extensive analyses that place Bazhan in the context of his time and explain the translating strategies that make Bazhan’s language come to life. A superb achievement deserving of all-round kudos!”
—Alexander Motyl, author of Vanishing Points
“Mykola Bazhan, having gone through different phases of creative development—from futuristic experiments in his youth to profound philosophical poetry at his life’s end—remains a virtuoso of the word despite the era and country in which he lived and worked. It sometimes seems that each of Bazhan’s poems resembles a musical symphony with a complex structure of tones and semitones, with an orchestration of poetic meanings and with an incomprehensible yet attractive rhythm. He split words into nuclei and molecules as to recreate a unique plasticity of language from those elements—which we call poetry.”
—Vasyl Makhno, poet, author of Thread and Winter Letters
