The Captain's Wife, and: Old Oliynyk

The Captain's Wife, and: Old Oliynyk Yuri Andrukhovych (bio) from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin The captain's Wife The captain's widow housed white micein the corners of her holey kitchen,and she kept a canary called Michelleand lots of those tricornered hankies. But, where did she spend her nights,in which catacombs make sacrifice?Sometimes Schlomo Fisher gave her a banana,sometimes a vegetable, sometimes the fig sign.(And the oldest of the Andrukhovychseven gave her bread along with vegetables.) The queen of backstreets dressed in tatters,her head a cabbage covered with scarves.And that captain: what was up with him,probably died young, full of emptiness. And so the immaculate widow kneltbefore the altar of the cold city wellso that the abyssal sacred flowing waterswashed away both holidays and weekdays. Inappropriate as a relic, she untangledher clot of veils, spread them overthe fence's vegetal ribs, and those emblemsof solitude dried where everyone could see them. And when she was gone, the Market Square wiltedand Arabian sands swept over her tracks.She flew away, they say, on white handkerchiefs.But sometimes they say the orderlies buried her. [End Page 78] Old Oliynyk Repairing umbrellas can actually entertain:let one sprout like bamboo or a bony treeand get all excited, once covered you're gawking,just reading the faded letters of ancient rains. His shop is a chapel embedded in a mossy wall,the whole melancholy city brings umbrellas there.Amors and lemurs shine in their silksas soon as people pronounce his oily name. Chinese dragons take off, all kinds of exotics:magnolias, orchids (all so lush, so meaty!).But some umbrellas are black as provincial troublesor holes at the bottom of galaxies, crows. That's why he likes to deliver admonitions, when drunk,bizarre aphorisms—impossible to understand—stumbling around the bus station with a half-full mugwhile coroners and Jesuits watch him from the windows. Is life worth living for old umbrellas? The question'stoo vexing for wandering philosophers. Still, withoutbegging permission, despite being diagnosed a paranoid,he survived three wars, the reigns of three josephs. And so one day he'll leave his niche in the mossy wallwithout permission, with glass half-full push past us, firm,fully aware, he'll fade around the corner into eternal silenceas he's called from heaven: "Come, Mr. Oilman!" [End Page 79] Yuri Andrukhovych Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature, has published more than a dozen poetry collections, fiction books, and collections of essays, and his work has been translated into many languages. Among his books that have been translated into English are the novels Recreations (CIUS, 1998), The Moscoviad (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), Perverzion (Northwestern University Press, 2005), and Twelve Circles (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), as well as a collection of poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse, 2018) and a collection of essays, My Final Territory (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk. John Hennessy John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books, 2007). He is the translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography (LHP, 2020), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP, 2023). Ostap Kin Ostap Kin is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press, 2019) and Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP, 2023), which he co-translated with John Hennessy. With Hennessy, he also co-translated Serhiy Zhadan's A New Orthography, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize. He co-translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych's Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press, 2018). Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College

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