Grand master of translation
Toward the 90th birth anniversary of Mykola Lukash
The soiree commemorating an anniversary of Mykola Lukash, a Ukrainian genius of literary translation, took place in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and saw the launching of the book of recollections Our Lukash, compiled by Leonid Cherevatenko.
Lukash presented Ukrainians with Faust, Don Juan, and Decameron; he translated Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Verlaine. Many heart-warming words were said at the soiree. In attendance were those who knew the master at a mature age, when he had become a famed translator and his fellow countrymen from his home town of Krolevets in Sumy oblast – they knew him at an early age, studied with him at school and later in university.
“Such people as Lukash are one in a million. It seems that only Ahatanhel Krymsky could compete with him as a polyglot,” said his older colleague Hryhorii Kochur once. Lukash was, above all, a talented artist – a prose writer, poet, novelist, lyricist and satirist, master of epigrams and parodies, and a magnificent expert in folklore and some dialects. For example, while translating Lorka’s poetry, written in the Galician dialect, Lukash successfully carried out an unprecedented experiment — he used the Hutsul dialect, which is related in spirit and character to the Galician one. Lukash was an innovative translator; he intentionally introduced little known and rarely used Ukrainian words into translated texts and coined neologisms.
Most interesting in Our Lukash are the texts written by Lukash’s colleagues – prosaists, poets, philologists, and translators — who are the pillars of contemporary Ukrainian culture: Valerii Shevchuk, Yevhen Hutsalo, Moisei Fishbein, Ivan Hryhorii, Vira Vovk, Hryhorii Kochur, Olha Petrova, Bohdan Zholdak, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Anatolii Dimarov, and others. This one volume offers, for the first time, not only useful information for professional translators but also a real history of literary translation, Ukrainian literature, and testimonies about the lives of our intellectuals in the 1950s through the 1980s.
