The path submerges in the dark of sleep.
The waters of bitter oblivion reach ever
higher. And ever closer is the edge.
I gaze into the emptiness of days and years —
and wonder: where is that borderland
that brings the severed soul back
to the primordial. To the vale of pleasures
heralded by the years of youth.
Quo vadis? The disobedient step
became itself in this unceasing walk,
and you are only following its trace.
The frail ribbon of the years grows thinner,
just like your shadow coming forth to meet you
and hypnotizing you... Your road has ultimately
ended. The darkness. The abyss. The edge.
So step beyond the verge. We cannot live
with this uncertainty. Between. By just half a step.
As if the foot was raised and paused,
and then it froze. A half-desire
cut off by semi-hesitation. Extensive borderlands
conceal themselves behind the hills of anguish —
the daring aims of space can’t see them.
Oh, what if that edge could know
that we are fractured! What does it take
for a mountain to become a mountain? What if we
could move these borderlands of time,
these borderlands of lingering
when the withered figures of desire,
these storms of passion, now reduced to ashes,
have fallen suddenly on us.
Vasyl Stus
Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) was a poet, translator, and literary critic, widely regarded as one of the foremost authors in the Ukrainian language. He is renowned for his acutely tragic philosophical poems, complex imagery, and frequent use of rare words and self-invented neologisms. Although very few of his literary works dealt with political issues, he was repressed for his support of the Ukrainian dissident movement and for his criticism of the Soviet Union’s colonial Russianization policies that sought to eliminate the national identity of Ukrainians. Stus spent many years of his life in detention. The KGB often confiscated the manuscripts of his—mostly nonpolitical—poems and translations (including Rilke, Goethe, and Kipling), many of which were destroyed and lost to posterity.
In 1972, Stus was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and three years of exile. He served his sentence in Russia: in Mordovian forced labor camps and in a village in the Magadan oblast. In 1979, Stus returned to Kyiv, but in 1980, he was arrested again. Stus received ten years of imprisonment and five years of exile for “anti-Soviet activity” and was transported to a forced labor camp in the Perm oblast, Russia. He declared hunger strikes several times. In 1983, Stus was put into solitary confinement for a year. In September 1985, after a week in a cold, unheated punishment cell, Vasyl Stus died, under unclear circumstances (source: Poetry International).
HD
Poem: The path submerges in the dark of sleep (fragment)
Translation from Ukranian: Bohdan Tokarsky
Film: Regen (Rain) by Joris Ivens (1929)
Music: Ezio Bosso - Rain, In Your Black Eyes
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