In Ukraine Antonych was and remains something akin to a poetic cult figure, first and foremost among younger poets. The striking innovativeness of his poetic mode of thinking has profoundly shaped the creative expressiveness of succeeding generations, including the most recent.
Yuri Andrukhovych Some of the poems from Antonych's The Book of the Lion, as well as from the posthumously published The Great Green Gospel and Rotations deserve to be read alongside the work of his great contemporaries, such as Garcia Lorca and Mandelstam. It's there that the poet's metaphoric power comes fully into its own. Michael Naydan has done a major service in carrying over Antonych's desnse, syntactically supple verse into English.
Askold Melnyczuk, University of Massachusetts at Boston A selection of Lemko-Ukrainian Antonych's (1909-37) poems were translated into English by American poets Mark Rudman and Paul Nemser for a 1977 volume edited by emigre Ukrainian poet Bohdan Boychuk, but otherwise, his work is little known on the world stage. Naydan (Ukrainian studies, Pennsylvania State U.) offers a complementing selection to mark the centenary of the poet's birth. Over half of the 108 poems appeared in English for the first time here, and of the others, he prefers his own translation, naturally. The selection is from all his published collections, as well as some uncollected poems. An index of names in the introductions is included, along with English titles and titles in Latin and Ukrainian.
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