Publications in Other Languages

PUBLICATIONS 1N OTHER LANGUAGES 537 PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES Watson Kirkconnell This will be my last annual survey of Canadian books in languages other than English and French. My first such survey, contributed on the invitation of Arthur Woodhouse, was for 1937, and in it I included the books for 1935 and 1936, in order that this feature might have the same terminus a quo as LETTERS IN cANADA in the two major languages. As I lay down my pen, I shall thus have covered the publications for thirty-one years, totalling almost 2,000 volumes. The languages chiefly dealt with have been Icelandic, Ukrainian, and German, but a few others have been sprinkled in. The sheer labour has been formidable and I am reluctantly signing off for physical reasons. The spirit indeed is willing but the eyes are weak. Michael Sharik's little book of Ukrainian verse consists largely of rhythmic tribute to kinfolk, near and far. It opens, appropriately enough, with odes to Ukraine and to Canada, the latter of which, written in triplets, declares Your boundless prairie-land my ardour takes, The crystal mirrors of your silver lakes In which the image of your forests wakes ...* Father Stefan Semchuk's fifth collection of poems, Re~ections, is much more urbane and sophisticated. The volume has five subdivisions, each with its own appropriate motto: Part I, "Odes," with a motto in French from Baudelaire; Part II, 'Wilderness and Sea," with a motto in German from Goethe; Part III, "The City," with a motto in Spanish from St. John of the Cross; Part IV, "Dialogue and Symposium," with a motto in Ukrainian from Yuri Klen; and Part v, "Conclusion," with a motto in Ukrainian from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. While the book is officially dedicated to the Centennial of Canada and is formally opened with odes to Canada and to an unnamed Canadian metropolis, this centennial pattern presently disappears. In Section n, his favourite tree is the Californian eucalyptus and in Section m, "The City," Los Angeles and San Diego get a poem apiece but no Canadian city makes the roster. In a poem entitled "Interplanetary," it is interesting to see a priestly poet of the astronaut age turn by a sort of conditioned reflex to space travel in terms of Christian apocalyptic: ..All ~anslations in this article are by Watson Kirkconnell. 538 LETI'ERS IN CANADA: 1965 I shall begin to quaff my nectar, A heavenly potion, sweet and warm, Poured for me by an angel-spectre Of interplanetary charm. And all who know that circumstance Shall be a family, warm and one, Soothed by the bright, celestial glance · Shed by the Father and the Son. The most intriguing area of the book, however, is Part IV, which opens with a conversation between the Father and the Son, and then goes on to a Symposium at which the laconic fellow-banqueters include Kant, Hegel, Descartes, some Atomists, Plato, Spinoza, Baruch, Schopenhauer, some agnostics, Marx, Engels, Lucifer, Dzerzhynsky, Stalin, Lenin, Sosiura, a Babylonian woman, Rilsky, Franko, St. Thomas, and St. Joseph. Dr. M. I. Mandryka's fourth volume of verse (bringing his total to 664 pages) contains eighty-six poems written in 1961-65. Its seven subdivisions are: Gloria in Excelsis, Aurora Borealis, Lyrics, Portraits, Ballads, In Memoriam, The Traveller. His memorial tributes are to his friends, Todos Osmachka, I. Bahryany, 0. Ewach, and M. Pohoretsky. Perhaps his most original poem is the long narrative, "The Traveller," written in heroic quatrains in paragraphs. According to his own prologue : ."The poem consists of a gallery of word-pictures of the world, past, present and future; it is a summa summarum from my life's experience , from the summation of my philosophy of history...." He begins with the Straits of Bosphorus and ends thirty-seven pages later with the Straits of Gibraltar; but in between, unlike Goldsmith's "Traveller," he has covered most of the habitable earth. Egypt, India, Viet-Nam, China, and Japan are succeeded by the Americas and the Straits of Magellan. He echoes Heraclitus in his musing on the fugacity ofhuman life: Life is a process, endless and incessant, Chained to a change of being, by...