New-Canadian Letters

I , 426 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY V. NEW-CANADIAN LETTERS: WATSON KIRKCONNELL The chief New-Canadian contribution to scholarship during the past• year has been an annotated edition of the poetry of Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), the most gifted of all Ukrai~ian writers, prepared by Mr. Honore .Ewach of Winnipeg. Mr. Ewach, a graduate of the University of Saskatche-' 'wan, is an activejournali,st; but his best energies have been given to a study of the history and literature of the Ukraine. The present volume, published by a Ukrainian-Canadian group that calls itself "Culture and Education," is a JJ:lOSt creditable performance and is all the more valuable to the Ukrain...! ian c~mmunity here because the vic_ issitudes undergone by the publishing business in Europe have made books from overseas almost unobtainable. Canadians who are prepared to learn Ukrainian in order to read Shevchenko will find in him a spirit akin to that of Burns in his more fiery and patriotic moods. · r Even more significant, could it be claimed categori~ally for Canada, is the collected edition of the Songs and Poems of the late Kristjan Niels -Julius (1859-1936), edited by Professor Richard Beck of the University of North Dakota. Since both the poet and the editor of this definitive .edition were at one time residents of Winnipeg, and since, moreover,· the Dakota colony is largely a southward overflow of the Icelan-dic community in Manitoba and joins annually in many of. its communal celebrations, we may be justified in including the volume in the present survey. Within its covers are 673 poems, about half of them already published i_ n· an earlier volume, Kvidlingar (1920), and the ·other half appearing now for the first ti~e. ((Kainn," as the poet was familiarly called, excelled in dedicatory stanzas) ii1 verses (or special occasions and in epigrams. He knew personally nearly all the leading Icelanders in the United States and Canada, and verses addressed to them are copiously included in the present collection. As a sample of his epigrams, one may quote in translation the following lines, written after he had burned an old, badly-torn copy of the Bible: Into the kitchen fire I poke The Bible for cremation. "God gives, and takes away," I croak. But the Devil cries out, "Holy Smoke!" Mute is my meditation. .The editing of the texts has been carri~d out by Professor Beck with skill and scrupulous care. The same tribute should be paid to his editorship of the Icelandic Almanak, a Winnipeg annual largely devoted to _hjstorical research into pioneer settlement. · Of marked merit in the field of scholarly translation has been an English verse rendering, by Alex. Welikotny and C. E. L'Ami of Winnipeg, of the long romantic poem, Mtsyri ("The Novice"}, from the Russian of Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (1814-41) : This was published in the American Slavic and East European Review (Vol. IV, 1945, Nos. 8-9, pp. 93-110). . I , ', LETTERS IN CANADA 427 Two substantial volumes of fiction have been published in 1945 by the Ukrainian-Canadians. Elias Kiriak has now brought out a third instalment of his large-scale Sons of the Soil (now approaching 1,000 pages in length), a saga of the Ukrainian settlements in the c ·anadian West. The third volume is supplemented by a map of the little Alberta community- nine miles by six-where the settlers are spread out along Poshtar's Creek and Wakar's Pond, with two churches, two schools and a community hall. Unpretentious as to style, Mr. Kiriak's lengthy work nevertheless provides a full and valuable record of the adjustment of Ukrainian pioneers to life in a new land. Completely different in tone and setting is Alexander Luhowy's Dark Clouds from beyond the Pripet River, an historical novel of thep~riod of the Ukrain~an-Lithuanian war in 1649. His model is perhaps the historical novels of Sienkiewicz, but his inspiration is Ukrainian, not Polish, and is full of the zeal of Ukrainian nationalism. Published in English, but motivated by interest in the Ukrainian role in Canadian life, is Canad~ans of Ukrainian Origin, an extensive statistical study by...