Nazarii A. Nazarov holds a PhD in linguistics, and lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. His poems have appeared in national anthologies in Ukraine (both in Ukrainian and in French translation). Previously published collections include Escape from Babylon (2006), Torch Bearer (2009), and translation collections Gardens of Adonis: Minor Anthology of World Poetry (2015, translations from Modern and Ancient Greek, Persian etc.), and Cavafy: Poems (2016, from Modern Greek).

 

To His Library 

This text appears as an outcome of my deliberations about contemporary and future world literature. How can it look? How should it look? Who will be included in its canon? To what extent should it be ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’? In the following lines, I attempt to track the general passage (totally conjectural, of course) of the current and forthcoming forms of global literature.

 The poem was originally written in Ukrainian. I decided to make an English version of it to facilitate dialogue with other poets from different countries. I mention several outstanding personalities about whom I was thinking a lot at that moment. They are Ancient Roman writer and philosopher Cicero (106-143 BCE), medieval Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), and Ukrainian translator of Roman classics Mykola Zerov (1890-1937). I also pay homage to favorite Japanese writers of the Heian epoch – Murasaki Shikibu (978?-1014/1016) and Sey Shonagon (966-1017?). I conclude with the work of the poet Tao Yuanming (c. 365-427) and the Chinese classic The Book of Changes, I Ching (I m. BCE), which has been an inspiration for European thought since G. Leibniz (1646-1716). After gathering them together, I dissolve them into a landscape of mountains, literature, and other forms of silence. 

 

I have gathered you from all over the world,

My dear favorite books.

Books with rights and without.

Books of ashes and ice.

 

Oh, my Cicero and my Khayyam.

With two volumes of Zerov,

With Heian epoch,

You make a shell of marble.

 

There is a luminous hexagram

In The Book of Changes:

Tao Yuanming died long ago

But we are still contemporaries

 

Because both of us have quit the big river

And come back to the mountains –

To birds squirrels and stars –

And we talk to them

 

For there is no more desirable talk

Than the silence of an evening

When we sit in a broad circle

And write ancient verses

 

Man is just a reed

And those know it the best

Who embark on

the quest after the Word

 

2017/2019

Моїй бібліотеці

 

З усіх усюд я вас зібрав

Найкращі любі книги

Книжки з правами і без прав

Із попелу і криги

 

Мій Цицерон і мій Хаям

З двотомником Зерова

Ви із епохою Хеян

Як мушля мармурова

 

Стоїть у Книзі Перемін

Пломінна гексаграма:

Покійник Тао Юань Мін –

Епоха в нас та сама!

 

Бо ми з великої ріки

Вернулися у гори

Де птиці вивірки зірки

Із ними ми говорим

 

Нема жаданіших розмов

Аніж вечірня тиша

В великім колі сидимо

І древні вірші пишем

 

Людина тільки очерет

І знають це чудово

Ті хто рушає уперед

У подорож за словом.