Serhiy Zhadan (II) —The sea breathes with a black, warm heat...
Serhiy Zhadan (1974 –) was born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast, and is one of Ukraine’s most revered cultural figures. He is a poet, prose writer, rock musician, translator, and essayist, regarded as the voice of his generation and now residing in Kharkiv. Zhadan’s body of work spans three decades, and often gives voice to the people of the borderland provinces of the Donbas region, now largely illegally occupied by Russian military forces. In May 2024, he enlisted in a local National Guard brigade in Kharkiv.
In an article for The New York Times later that same year was published this excerpt of his recent work, translated by Virlana Tkacz and and Wanda Phipps:
The only rule – grow roots,
Break through.
The only chance – reach out for a branch, grab hold of a voice.
There is nothing else.
No one will remember you for your silence.
No one but you can name the rivers nearby.
The water and sea occupy a powerful symbolic function across his work – operating as a site of infinite expanse, intense feeling, and personal and historical reckoning. It is also a container (and transmitter) of memory, shipwrecked vessels, and uncountable grains of sand.
Excerpt:
The sea breathes with a black, warm heat,
unfurling like a bolt of cloth.
Three merchants sit together at a table
and share the warm wine, equal shares.
The fog’s stilled milk
seeps into their jackets.
And the first, with his fist,
swats brittle moths and beetles.
For in his heart, searing fires
burn for reasons no one knows,
and these last days a dark disease
is eating through his lungs.
He already knows which wonders
live in this murk and milk,
what the green‑ink words really mean,
needled into his knuckles.
All he has seen are night cities,
port cranes and freight,
a fret that swells by night
and tramples through your soul.
All he has heard are old vessels,
friends shot point‑blank,
a woman, in a hotel haze,
telling something about Istanbul.
Now he sits inside this fog,
knows everything – and doesn’t care.
The second will always give him a loan,
the third will offer wine.
And I would like, at the end of life,
to buy into that sweet deceit,
before I cast off with no return,
before I dive into the devil’s fog –
to sit and drink my wine,
to look death in its plain face,
with friends who have long known everything –
they know, and remain silent.
Explanation:
Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan’s [The sea breathes with black, warm heat] (2008) engages with the littoral space as a setting that is alive, defined by processes of departure, transition, and movement of equivalence to the passage of time and human life. Here, the Black Sea waters function in metaphorical reflection of the unknown or unknowable, the eternal, obfuscating, and revelatory. The sea is a supernatural force – one to be feared, that “breathes black heat”, but that is pervasive in the conceptual molding of our human knowledge and experience.
Citation: Zhadan, Serhiy. [The sea breathes with black, warm heat], as featured in Ефіопія, Фоліо, 2009. pp. 19-20. trans. Yevhenii Monastyrskyi