Oksana Lutsyshyna (I) — [...and further there is a room where there aren't any poems]
Description:
Oksana Lutsyshyna (1974 –) is a Ukrainian poet and prose writer born in Uzhorod. She is the author of 2 novels – notably Ivan and Phoebe (2019), for which she received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Fiction, and Love Life (2015) – as well as a collection of short stories and three collections of poetry. Lutsyshyna earned a BA in English from Uzhhorod National University, MAs in French and Gender Studies from the University of South Florida, and a PhD in comparative literature, focusing on the work of Bruno Schulz and Walter Benjamin, from the University of Georgia. She also regularly composes critical articles and blogs for the feminist website Povaha.
Excerpt:
and beyond that there is another room
turns, underground passages, tunnels
below tunnels and below other passages
and you know that this is also a road that you can take
which slopes down and down
until you understand that now you are not only beneath the earth
but also beneath the sea
and its waves crash somewhere on the surface
somewhere the sea strikes sand, stone, and land
somewhere it billows up with every cell
like a mythical dragon
it lifts its head and hisses
what thin slab separates you from it,
why didn’t it crack yet? how much
time does it take for you to go from this sea to another
to the one that is locked in the semicircle of a continent,
poured into small bays
into the wet earth from which mangrove trees grow?..
this is your around the world trip of a sliced-off circle
smaller than the circle of the earth
...And so you arrive at the point of the darkness
and finally you hear it, the sea,
you grope the moist walls and listen to its weight —
here, at this depth, there are no waves,
but through a small crack in the slab water leaks in
and moves to you like sound, like light,
like sound, like light
like light
Explanation:
Ukrainian poet Oksana Lutsyshyna’s [...and further there is a room where there aren't any poems] explores the littoral setting as one of deeply buried revelation. Across this poem, she envisions a room buried deep underground, divided from the wild, dragon-like, waters above by “tunnels and…other passages”; “a thin slab [that] separates you from it,/ why didn’t it crack yet?” Such a boundary might be interpreted to represent the limitations of human perception, encouraging us to look towards the ancient waters as a source of guidance or authentic truth. Arriving deep beneath the surface of the earth – “at the point of the darkness”, where “finally you hear it, the sea,/ you grope the moist walls and listen to its weight…” – we are confronted by pure sound and light, manifestations, perhaps, of the sublime.
Citation: Lutsyshyna, Oksana. ...and further there is a room where there aren’t any poems. Trans. Olena Jennings, Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations, ed. Maxim Tarnawsky, vol. 6, Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada, 23 Nov. 2021, pp. 105. Ukrainian Literature, tarnawsky.artsci.utoronto.ca/elul/Ukr_Lit/Vol06/.