Publications in Other Languages 1

484 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 the screaming in the halls has been tastefully silenced. Would not an honest account of the bitter artistic battles, the David Haber mess or the philosophic differences behind the Oliphant-Franca feud, be more relevant than a discussion of non-slip paint for studio floors? Well, as Franca has said, 'I'm writing two books. This is the one they expect.' She is in the unique position of being able to offer us not what we expect, but what we deserve, an authoritative illumination of a rather special event. (DONALD HIMES) Publications in Other Languages 1 / NATALIA APONIUK The most significant work in the field of Ukrainian letters to appear in Canada in 1978, and an important contribution to Ukrainian scholarship generally, is the Anthology of Ukrainian Lyric Poetry, Part I: Up to '9'9, edited by Orest Zilynsky and published under the auspices of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Oakville: Mosaic Press). This is the first anthology since Ivan Franko's Akordy [Chords) of 1903 to focus on lyric poetry in an attempt to trace the development of the genre. The innovative quality of the collection (especially for Ukrainian literature) lies not only in Zilynsky's having brought together more than four hundred lyrics written over a period of three centuries, but even more in his arrangement of the works. The poems are not arranged chronologically according to author; instead they are grouped in ten sections, each centring on a specific theme. The poems are then given chronologically within each section, so that the reader can follow the evolution and treatment of a particular idea within the realm of lyric poetry. As the editor states in his excellent introduction, although everyone is aware of the lyric in its 'artless' forms - the lullaby, the work song, the military song, and the funeral lament - the development of the lyric into an artistic expression of a person's complex inner existence is linked to historical conditions which work against the individualization of the person. This is especially true of the catastrophes which for centuries absorbed the collective interest of the people inhabiting the area including the present-day Ukraine. As a.result the lyrical passages which are so prominent in the twelfth-century Slovo 0 polku Ihorevim [The Tale of Ihor's Campaign) were not taken up again for centuries. Although Zilynsky includes representative works from as early as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, he dates the beginning of the modem Ukrainian lyric from about 1819 and the works of Kotliarevs'kyi. About two hundred pages of the anthology are devoted to the nineteenth century and more than one hundred to the twentieth, a perhaps surprising ratio PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES /1 485 since only works written up to '9'9 are included, but one that attests to Zilynsky's claim about the relative newness of the genre in Ukrainian literature. Zilynsky's cut-off date is 1919 because that date, which marks the consolidation of Soviet power in the Ukraine, also marks a turningpoint in the nature of Ukrainian literary development. As an introduction to each of the ten sections of the anthology Zilynsky includes a folk song, his symbolic tribute to the importance of folk poetry as the basis of poetic expression. The sections are entitled 'Love: 'Fate: 'People: 'The Land: 'The Past: 'The City: 'Moments: 'Creativity: and 'Struggle: and we again have a graphic illustration of the relative newness of the lyric and of how recently certain themes have made their appearance in it. The first five divisions have been dealt with from the time of the earliest lyrics. 'Horizons: in which Zilynsky has grouped poems whose themes extend beyond the geographical boundaries of the Ukraine, illustrates a later theme which first became prominent in poems Shevchenko wrote in exile in Central Asia after 1847. The theme of the city is also relatively new and unexplored. Though it is touched on in some of Shevchenko's later lyrics and in some of Franko's, it is a twentieth-century theme which, prior to the Revolution, was treated mainly by the futurist Mykhayl Semenko. (A further result of Zilynsky's arrangement of...