Ivan Franko
& A. Z. Foreman
Two Poems
Ivan Franko Writing Sonnets in Prison
by A. Z. Foreman
Outside his latest jail, coldblooded stars
gossip with snow on guards’ caps. Kolomyia,
playing a song of planets to the bars
of iron, hates a man for an idea.
The warden jangling at the cellblock door
is the law’s laugh and steals his freedom sleep.
Dreams fold their wings like bats and flee once more
into the brain’s back attic. What could keep
poets alive here? Petrarch had a sword
and zephyrs. He sang beauty like a lord.
This man breathes septic air, compulsively
shoveling shitstorms into fourteen lines.
It is a song of cynics he refines
as birds escape. He keeps his sanity.
Opening of Prison Sonnets
by Ivan Franko
Translated from the Ukrainian by A. Z. Foreman
This is the house where sighs and weeping linger,
a nest of terrors, torture, tears, betrayal.
On entering, clench your teeth and every finger
and leave your thoughts and wishes. They will fail.
It looks like where they clear the rye of chaff,
but at the same time sow fresh chaff for pleasure.
Here truth is measured by the paragraph
and untruth pouring beyond any measure.
They guard foundations here. But the foundation
of all foundations — will, ideas, creation
and the heart’s words— is just a rag to shred.
If you had hopes when you fell in this joint
of finding meaning, purpose or a point
”Lasciate ogni speranza” as Dante said.
”Narrow and hard the road to goodness lies”
Or so the words of holy scripture say.
I’m ready to denounce that line as lies
having now seen the jailhouse entryway.
The reek of hay is the first warning sign.
Then the door squeaks into a cramped hall where
you have to walk a steep and pinching line
into a yard like a bear’s empty lair.
A soldier is patrolling in the yard,
vestibules guarded by a gloomy guard,
inmates like shadows scurrying about.
Narrow and hard the road, yes, but to what?
Just ask the people tortured in this rut.
Count the tears shed in here, day in, day out.
Ivan Yakovych Franko (1856 – 1916) was a Ukrainian poet, essayist, journalist, translator and political activist. He is known today principally for his poetry which has been tremendously influential in Ukraine. Orphaned as a teenager, he studied Ukrainian language and literature at Lviv University where he also began writing poetry. His political activities would see him imprisoned twice (the second time for encouraging civil disobedience among the peasantry) and expelled from Lviv University (later renamed Ivan Franko University after his death). During his incarceration he wrote the sequence Prison Sonnets of which the opening is translated here.
A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and language-acquisition addict currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in sundry periodicals including The Threepenny Review, ANMLY and The Los Angeles Review, as well as anthologies like the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, "A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba" (Saqi Books) and "Before the Cameras Leave Ukraine" (BlackSpring Press). His translation of Saint John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul has been reprinted widely and set to music by Christopher Marshall. Most importantly, if you have a dog or even a tame pet fox he'd love to pet it.