OLEH LYSHEHA

OLEH LYSHEHA (1949-2014) was a poet, prose writer, translator, playwright, and sculptor born in in the town of Tysmenytsia, near Ivano-Frankivsk. He was expelled from his studies in English at Lviv University for his participation in the samvydav (samizdat) journal Skrynia (The Chest, 1971; edited by Hrytsko Chubai), and he was prohibited from publishing his poems until 1989. Lysheha served in the Soviet army in Buryatia. He is the author of the poetry books Velykyi mist (The Large Bridge, 1989) and Snihovi ta vohniu (For the Snow and Fire, 2002), a book of selected poems also entitled Velykyi mist (2012), the prose collection Druzhe Li Bo, brate Du Fu . . . (Friend Li Po, Brother Tu Fu . . . , 2010), and is one of the authors in the anthology Chetvero za stolom (Four at the Table, 2004). The Ukrainian- and English-language publication The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (1999), co-translated with James Brasfield, received the prestigious PEN Club Award for best book-length translation in 1999. Lysheha’s poetry has also been translated into German, Dutch, Estonian, Croatian, Buryat, Polish, Russian, and Japanese. He translated English-language literature into Ukrainian (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Mark Twain, Malcolm Lowry) and co-translated, with I. Zuiev, from Chinese (Stories from Ancient China, 1990). A book of his essays entitled Stare zoloto (Old Gold) was published posthumously in 2015, as was Potsilunok Elly Fitsdzherald (Ella Fitzgerald’s Kiss), a collection of essays, translations, and poems that he himself compiled and edited.

An Oleh Lysheha poem set to music was sung by Taras Chubai at Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series events entitled Svitlo i Spovid: Light and Confession, which took place in April 2008.