from “Ashes and Bloom”

translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

[O Lord, it’s empty in our house]

O Lord, it’s empty in our house,
O Lord, it’s cold and damp, down below
The missing landlord’s voice has vanished,
Outside the hills have darkened,
Lord, it’s empty, give me strength,
The door is battered, the lock rusty,
The wind drives the clouds, exactly like
The voice of a nobody, last in his line,
Outdoors, the fading of the light,
Beyond the slush, the autumn darkness,
There in the corner a smoldering seed dies out,
It’s empty, O Lord, who art.

Scorched Earth. 1995

. . . And a black raven perched on blackness,
and there were no houses, nor gardens,
and the eye of a raven, black and blind,
remembered the houses and gardens,
and the moment it flew in here,
when the heat put out its eyes.
On a black cliff the blind raven croaks,
and the ashes have covered all footprints,
sit and croak, lost one, sit
and croak, and croak, blind one, as if
you can resurrect them, you beggar—
burnt-down houses, scorched gardens.

The Artist Abnegates

I can no longer get by on words. Silence,
like a requiem, echoes in my temple,
drops like a dead bird into my hands,
my frozen word. Silence.

I can no longer get by on music. Pain
thunders through me, the notes are inaudible,
the strings just sway before me.
I can no longer get by on music. Pain.

I can no longer get by on color. Blood
covers black, white, and lilac,
the green earth and the dawn sky.
I can no longer get by on color. Blood.

In the May sky, a lark circles, spinning lace.
The spring world is booming with thunder.
So how do I get by? How? Really, like this—on tears?
On tears. Like an ordinary infant.

Ab Antiquo

As your eyes close, the worlds go dark.
The night touches your torn clothes.
Scabrous lips. The circling of death,
or a bird somewhere circling invisibly.

And the dust, and the dusk on your lips.
And the taste of grapes and blood,
your desiccated evening prayers
that in a moment will turn to ash.

In the morning there’s neither shelter 
nor home, only an immensity of white desert
meeting vast horizon, the eternal scales.

And this wandering on the edge, always naked,
and there, somewhere, beyond the horizon,
always the apparition of a vineyard.

[After leaving the barn and woodshed]

To Ihor Rymaruk

After leaving the barn and woodshed, 
these boundaries of suburb and village,
this circle that the bee has created,
the limits of the harvest’s recollection,
there, beyond the borders, where the soul lived,
crossing yourself at dawn,
after leaving the barn and woodshed,
you set out on a journey around the world,
as there’s no more honey or sting at home.

Tenebrae. Psalm

Save me, my beyond-heavenly Father,
O, how it swirls and roars,
O, how the red flame burns,
Consuming this body made from dust,
It whirls, God, it trembles,
It whirls, Lord, it’s so loud.

I’m already on the other side of pain . . .

---

Moisei Fishbein (1946–2020) was an award-winning Ukrainian poet, essayist, and translator, author of the collections Iambic Circle (1974), Collection Without a Title (1984), Apocrypha (1996), Scattered Shadows (2001), Early in Paradise (2006), Prophet (2017), a collection of children’s poetry, Wonderful Garden (1991), and translations from many languages including German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Georgian. A collection of his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke into Ukrainian appeared in 2018. He was a recipient of the Vasyl´ Stus Prize, the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, the Order “For Intellectual Courage” (awarded by the journal Yi), and the Omelyan Kovch Award. He was a member of the Ukrainian Center of the International PEN Club and the National Union of Writers of Ukraine. In 1979, Fishbein was forced to leave the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, he worked at the journal Suchanist’ (Munich/New York), a venue of literature, politics, culture, and the arts. Before moving in the early 1980s to Munich (Germany), where he took a job as a writer, editor and correspondent for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, he lived in Israel. Fishbein returned to Ukraine in 2003. His poems have been translated into German, Hebrew, and other languages. His poems in English translation have appeared in AGNI, Modern Poetry in Translation, and various anthologies.

John Hennessy is the author of three collections, Exit Garden State (Lost Horse Press, 2024), Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books, 2007). He is the translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography (LHP, 2020), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP, 2023).

Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, which received an honorable mention for Best Translation Prize from American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Best Translation Prize. He is the translator, with John Hennessy, of Yuri Andrukhovych’s collection Set Change (NYRB/Poets, 2024), the anthology Babyn Yar, and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, which won the Derek Walcott Prize and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s collection Songs for a Dead Rooster. His work appears in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

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