WRITERS' CHOICE
DAVID IGNATOW:
To dis–
cover a foreign poet of genius is
exciting to one's own poetic
ambitions and at the same time a
comment on one's own na ture
and circumference. On the one
hand the discovery leads to
openings of the spirit until now
unrealized as a result of ignor–
ance or an aesthetic decision
made long ago. On the other
hand one is made to recognize
oneself and one's own work that
much more clearly for what it is.
Square of Angels, Selected Po–
ems,
by Bohdan Antonych, ex–
ulting in its resonant folk imag–
ery and metaphor, stirs one to
think and to exult with it and to
set oneself as poet in vibrant
apposition to him. Antonych is
deeply religious but also deeply
skeptical. He taught himself to
be closely identified with his
roots in the back hills of the
Carpathian mountains where he
was born, in a small, obscure
village that retained and even
lived by its myths, legends, and
pagan rituals through the Rus–
sian Revolution. Antonych's ge–
nius sprang into being as he
turned to the culture of his birth–
place during his years as a uni–
versity student in the city of
Lviv. It was a culture permeated
with natural phenomena as seen
through mystically ritualistic
eyes and produced in Antonych
powerful evocations of religious
states of mind. But since he spent
most of his mature life in Lviv,
where he had educated himself,
the first outpouring of his sensi–
bilities began to be penetrated by
the sights, sounds, and themes of
city life, and it was the start of
skepticism, even bitterness, that
was as deeply felt as his earlier
religious ecstasy. In short, his
was the classic conflict between
the past and the present, but its
results in poetry were absolutely
unique. Vast sounds of worship
and awe rise from his poetry of
the village in which he was
born. The imagery is amazingly
vivid, perhaps because of its
strangeness to our modernized
senses, but it is gripping, and
then comes the imagery of the
city, to which all of us of the city
are accustomed, having grown
hardened to it through weariness
and anger with it. Antonych
records it all in magnificent
acerbic lines. He died in 1937, at
the age of twenty-eight, at the
opening of a great career.
I have put this book down
time and again, refreshed in my–
self by the cleansing power of its
spirit, even at its most bitter.
The translations are by Paul
Nemser and Mark Rudman with
Bohdan Boychuk. The introduc-
