This volume gathers together translations of the best works from all six of the extraordinary extant collections by Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor A Greeting to Life (1931), The Grand Harmony (1932-33), Three Rings (1934), The Book of the Lion (1936), The Green Gospel (1938), and Rotations (1938), as well as poetry published separately. It includes a translator's note and a biographical sketch on the poet by Michael M. Naydan and a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world's leading experts on Antonych's poetry. While Antonych is not a household name in the discourse on Modernism that includes such great Slavic poets as Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, as well as their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, in the opinion of many literary critics, he unquestionably should be. Critics have also compared him to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. Only a small amount of Antonych's works has been available in English to date. In 1977 émigré Ukrainian poet Bohdan Boychuk with the American poets Mark Rudman and Paul Nemser translated and published a small, but well-received, book of Antonych's selected poems, A Square of Angels . The current edition of ninety-six poems complements that earlier volume with nearly two-thirds of the translations appearing in English for the first time and honors Antonych on the hundred-year anniversary of his birth.
Author
Bohdan Ihor Antonych was a 20th century Ukrainian poet. In 1934 Antonych received third prize honours from the Ivan Franko Society of Writers and Journalists for his work Three Signet Rings. Antonych was born and raised in the Lemkos village of Novytsia where his father, Vasyl, was a parish priest. In 1928 Antonych left Novytsia to study at Lviv University, where he remained until he received his degree in Slavic studies in 1933. In order to help finance his chosen career of professional writer, he occasionally worked as an editor for journals such as Dazhboh and Karby.
