MK: And what were the first literary texts that you read in Ukrainian?
BZ: In general, my first contact with that language was the poems of Dmytro Pavlychko which I was given for translation.
MK: Pavlychko is not only a poet; he’s also a social and independence activist, a politician and also a diplomat: among other posts, he was Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland in the years 1999-2001. How did it happen that his poetry came to your attention?
BZ: It was in the ‘80s – at the time I worked on the editorial board of ‘Akcent’ which was adjacent to the Lublin publishing house. And Jadzia Białowąs from that office asked me in the corridor if I wouldn’t be willing to translate a collection of Pavlychko’s poetry which they were planning to publish. Those were times when publishing houses were assigned particular countries from the Communist bloc and the Lublin publishing house was assigned Belarusan and Ukrainian literature. So I said to her that I took Russian for seven years in elementary and middle school. ‘And you know Polish?’ she asked. I answered – and I remember this well – I take pride in the fact that I know Polish quite well. So she said: ‘You should be able to handle it. Give it a try.’ And she gave me Pavlychko’s books, lent me a not particularly useful dictionary, since it came from the 1950s and was castrated when it came to terminology regarding religion and more broadly regarding the entire scope of spirituality.
MK: Did you previously know any writers from Ukraine or read anything in translation?
BZ: I had practically no contact with that literature. Had I been asked to name some Ukrainian writers, I would have named Lesya Ukrainka and Taras Shevchenko whose poetry I didn’t know at all back then. I had also heard about the contemporary writer Maksym Rylski, whom I knew to be an excellent translator of Polish literature and a friend of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. At that time, I was mostly interested in poetry and I was convinced that Ukrainians wrote folkloristic poetry, not to say folk poetry. And, at the time, that sort of lyricism didn’t appeal to my ear. When, for instance, I came across the word ‘matula’ [a slang term for ‘mother’ – trans. note] in the poems of Józef Czechowicz, I broke out in hives.
MK: How did your first Ukrainian translation go?
BZ: At first, I was sounding it out syllable by syllable, because my last live contact with the Cyrillic alphabet ended in 1962 when I did my matriculation exams and then, in the ‘70s, I translated a few poems by Osip Mandelshtam and some older Russians and that’s it. In addition, the Ukrainian alphabet is a little different from Russian – it has a letter that doesn’t exist in Russian and further the letters ‘i’ and ‘y’ are written differently. So in the beginning it wasn’t easy, but after a while – once I’d already begun to read it fluently, I found that I understood nearly everything. What’s more, I found that I needed the dictionary less and less, even less than when I was translating English poetry. And, in the end, there was one more thing: Would a Polish poet who wasn’t egotistical, but who thought he wasn’t bad, deign to translate the poetry of some Ukrainian?
MK: A strong sense of superiority.
BZ: I say that to you as a kind of confession. Pavlychko and Tadeusz Nowak came to my rescue.
MK: A somewhat forgotten poet and prose writer, but then a well-known literary figure.
BZ: When I was in Budapest in 1977, on the Polish delegation was, among others, Tadeusz Nowak and on the Ukrainian delegation was Dmytro Pavlychko. And the two of them led us around Budapest and you could see that they were friends. And I thought to myself that, if Tadeusz Nowak – whom I’d always respected – saw fit to befriend Pavlychko, then I should be prepared to translate Pavlychko’s poetry. Especially as it turned out that it was completely, utterly worthwhile.
MK: Dmytro Pavlychko is now an elderly man; he’s 93 years old.