Oleh Lysheha

Andriy Bondar describes Lysheha as the Ukrainian Henry Thoreau of the beginning of the 21st century: The way of life of ordinary people does not seem to apply to him.

He exists in a parallel universe – he likes to walk barefoot in the city, to swim in the ice-cold river in winter, he catches fish with his teeth, knows how to make paper from mushrooms, never uses public transport, and does not have a job.

Oleh Lysheha (Олег Лишега; 30 October 1949 – 17 December 2014 ) was a Ukrainian poet, playwright, translator and intellectual.

Oleh Lysheha was born in 1949 to a family of teachers in Tysmenytsia, a Carpathian village in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine.

Twenty years later, Lysheha became a student studying foreign languages at the University of Lviv named after the renowned Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko.

Lysheha entered Lviv University in 1968, where during his last year, he was expelled for his participation in an "unofficial" literary circle, Lviv Bohema.

As punishment, Lysheha was drafted into the Soviet army and internally exiled.

During the period 1972-1988, he was banned from official publication, but in 1989 his first book Great Bridge (Velykyi Mist) was published.

In 1972, Lysheha was expelled and drafted to the Soviet army for membership in Lviv Bohema, a dissident group of artists at Lviv University.

After serving in the military, the poet returned to his birthplace, working at a local factory.

In due time, Lysheha returned to Lviv, and soon thereafter moved to Kyiv where he married.

In his position as a technical employee at the Kyiv Theatrical Institute of Karpenko Karyi, Lysheha continued to write poems and translate.

At the age of forty, Lysheha published his first collection of poems - "Great Bridge" (1989), a book which placed him at the forefront of the Ukrainian poetic community.

From 1997–98, Oleh Lysheha was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar to Penn State in Pennsylvania, United States.

After his return to Ukraine, the poet dove into a prolific artistic labor of poetry, painting and sculpture, as well as resumed his seasonal alteration between the capital and his birth home in the Carpathian mountains.

Years later, after meeting his future co-translator James Brasfield, Lysheha published "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" (1999) making his work available for the first time to the English reader.

A masterpiece of Ukrainian drama is Oleh Lysheha's miracle play "Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu" included in the second section of the 1999 English publication.

For "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," Lysheha and his co-translator James Brasfield from Penn State University, received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Lysheha is the first Ukrainian poet to receive the PEN award.

Whatever the style, Lysheha and Brasfield received the 2000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

A presentation of the award was held May 15 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

The poems were selected by Lysheha himself and follow the trajectory of his career.

The book is divided into three parts.

Section one holds shorter poems.

Section two "is a witty, brief, three-act play mostly in prose, Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu."

The third section consists of longer and more discursive narrative poems.

"Bear" (Vedmid)

After dining in the moonlight,

He sorted the bones —

The small and the larger separated accurately

On ground that was still warm —

What if someone should come along and decide

Thirteen years after his first work, Lysheha published "To Snow and Fire" (2002).

Another artistic corner of Lysheha's contributions lies in the translation field.

He has translated into the Ukrainian language works by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Lysheha is also the co-author of a book of translations from Chinese, "The Stories of Ancient China."

Literary reviewers have written that "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" – the English translations of Lysheha – have nothing in common with the Ukrainian poetic tradition.

As Bondar, for example, notes the poetry is "influenced by natural philosophy, shamanistic meditation, total denial of a technocratic world, and escapism."

Lyshaha's publisher Harvard University Press describes the poet's work as "informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like introspection, with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature."