Poet
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Natalka Bilotserkivets 1954-... country: Ukraine language: Ukranian |
Ukraine, which is one of Europe’s largest countries, is also one of its least known. Apart from the fact that it used to be ‘the granary of Russia’ and home to the Cossack people, we know very little indeed. Only a few years ago, Ukraine reappeared on the map as an independent state after centuries of domination by Poland and Russia. As little known as the country itself is its literature. It is for the first time that Poetry International has welcomed a Ukrainian poet to its festival. Natalka Bilotserkivets, born 1954, studied philology in Kiev, where, as a student, she made her poetic début with the collection Ballad about the Invincibles. She has since published four more collections, the latest one being Allergy, which was named Ukraine’s book of the year 1999. Apart from poetry, she writes literary essays. As sources of inspiration Bilotserkivets draws upon Russian poets (Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova) and the French symbolists (Baudelaire, Verlaine). Thanks to this combined influence her work, although truly East European in atmosphere, is accessible also to the Western reader. Her themes are universal - the alienation of modern man and his craving for love - and her subjects range from Picasso to 11 September 2001. A strong, yet unsentimental, melancholy marks her poetry, a sense of profound, almost tangible restlessness, transience, displacement, volatility, futility. There are tears, not in self-pity, but for man’s condition tout court. A mood of relativity, of humour, takes the place of bitterness and self-pity. We travel with the poet in dirty third-class railway carriages; there is leave-taking, from youth, from the loved one, from life; all things pass, we are not at home - yet all things lost stay with us, ‘in the flow of nightly water’. Life for Bilotserkivets has an indestructible integrity, with a hint of a mystic unity in which the sacred and the profane, the rose and the worm, the stench of urine and the aroma of spring can exist side by side, and in and through each other. Author: Gerard Rasch Translated by Ko Kooman Natalka Bilotserkivets (Ukraine, 1954) studied philology and works as an editor for the magazine Ukranian Culture. She made her début in 1976 and has published five collections of poems and a book of essays. She has won several major prizes for her poetry, which is balanced in form and elegiac in tone. Her work has been translated in many European languages, including English and German. Poets: |
