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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Standing Guard Over The Word 

24 November, 1998 - 00:00

November 17 was the 90th anniversary of Hryhory Kochur, outstanding
Ukrainian translator

The late 1920s, saw the beginning of an unprecedented humiliation and
ruination of Ukrainian literature, which continued into the 1980s.

It is a perpetually difficult and thankless, almost archeological work
to unearth under dense layers of totalitarian "writing" the tiniest bit
of real literary matter. Naturally, the horrible jurisdiction of that eternal
aggression was not extended to only few, so to speak, areas of national
culture where it had some chance to express itself like Western Ukraine
or in the

Ukrainian Diaspora. However, one has to agree with the sad truism that
culture can be completely expressed only under conditions of its full-fledged
development at home. Thus, the point was that under conditions of its nearly
entire elimination - by means of its being converted into an ugly appendix
to the dominating ideological mechanism - national culture had to find
a strategic alternative to this ruin.

Ukrainian literary translation, unique in its content and class, became
actually the main aesthetic vehicle of this strategy. The Ukrainian word,
brutally alienated from itself by the "system", reveals its all unfathomable
semantic deepness through translation. Maksym Rylsky, Mykola Lukash and
Hryhory Kochur became the symbols of this strategy aimed at saving our
withering literature. Thanks to this triumvirate, the Ukrainian word, abased
and rejected from other domains of national being, suddenly blazed up in
extraordinary fireworks of colors and meanings.

The translations by Hryhory Kochur, from the ancient Greeks to recent
great Slavs (in all, of more than one hundred and fifty poets and from
more than thirty languages) is a perfect implementation of the idea of
saving the national literature by a titanic effort of a genius. Yes, a
genius, who had overcome all the catastrophes of both his personal and
our collective biography, from innumerable violent deaths of 1930s and
ten years of hard labor in the Intyn colony, to further endless privations
at "liberty".

Alcaeus, Horace, Narekatsi, Shakespeare, Keats, Elliot, Leopardi, Goethe,
Heine, Mickiewicz, Eminesku, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Cavafy, Verlaine,
and great Slavic poets of modern vintage were the means by which Hryhory
Porfyrovych Kochur healed the mortally wounded Ukrainian word.

Hence, this all is not just about a philological culture, unexampled
in our century, which was combined with wonderful insight into the poetic
word, be it foreign or our own. It is about a continuous, and without publicistic
exaggeration, titanic work over the word as a prerequisite for a certain
standard of being, a standard which seemed to be irrecoverably lost, but
then was infinitely renewed, renewed by the effort of the translator who
dealt not only with the truth of a certain foreign text in its Ukrainian
rendition, but also with the Truth in a literal sense.

After the Intyn labor camp, Hryhory Kochur, together with Rylsky, Lukash,
and a handful of other Ukrainian translation enthusiasts not only translated.
He actually rescued the very sovereignty of the Ukrainian word which, despite
some vivid episodic debuts of the day, again found itself in the dead zone
of the official literature. The poet's modest dwelling in Irpin near Kyiv,
where the Ukrainian word resounded with sovereignty, resonant with the
verbal world, became for our literature almost what Leo Tolstoy's Yasnaya
Polyana was for Russian literature, its symbolic center, stubbornly distanced
from all the grimaces and grotesques of the pseudoliterary semiofficial
organs. Once Thomas Mann (in early 1960s Hryhory Porfyrovych used to say,
jokingly, that he had come down with thomasomania) said about his emigration:
"German literature is where I am," Similarly, Ukrainian literature was
where Kochur was. With all the aesthetic heritage it had accumulated and
all its future potential. "I will make the word stand guard over them."
Hryhory Kochur, together with Mykola Lukash assumed such a role of guardianship
without the least messianic gesture. The "system", of course had immediately
registered this in its police files and during seventies and eighties subjected
the great poet to tyrannical persecution, while the semiofficial literature
was, in fact, consistently-abominably neutral. Its instinct can eventually
be understood: what was its horribly drained pseudoword compared to this
Irpin, and actually Ukrainian word, which emulated the heritage of the
verbal world and the meanings it accumulated, rather than dull dogma and
its stupid institutions.

Hryhory Kochur also went through another fifteen years of semi-servitude,
and through actual internment in Irpin, which, in the long run impacted
on the quality of Kochur's word not one iota. Having much more important
things to do, he was quite ironic about the temporal uproar over his personality
when perestroika began.

This unique life concluded in the tonality surprising for our time:
the one of the fully accomplished duty.

"Traveler, hurry to Lacedaemon and tell the people that all of us are
lying here, true to our duty."

 

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