The Forest Song: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary - Paperback

by Lesya Ukrainka (Author), Serhii Sakal (Translator)

In the summer of 1911, Lesya Ukrainka was living in Georgia, four hundred miles from anywhere she had ever called home, ill with the tuberculosis that would kill her two years later. In ten or twelve days she wrote a play set in a forest in Volhynia that she had not seen in years and would not see again. It became the best-loved work in Ukrainian literature.

The Forest Song opens on a lake in early spring, among beings who have lived there far longer than any village: Lisovyk, the old lord of the wood; Vodyanyk in his lake; Rusalka, who kills by laughter. Mavka wakes from her winter sleep to a sound she has never heard - a young man playing a pipe. She goes to find him.

What follows is not the fairy tale that setup promises. Lukash is an ordinary young man with a mother, a debt, and a field that needs cutting. Mavka comes to live in his house and is put to work. A widow from the next village arrives, capable and impatient and entirely reasonable, and the forest gives ground to the farm. The play's argument is not nature against civilisation. It is about what a person owes to the thing they have woken in someone else - and about what survives being betrayed.

Ukrainka called it a drama-feieriia, a drama-fairy play: flying spirits, transformations, a house on fire, and inside all that machinery a marriage, a mother-in-law, and a death.

This annotated edition is designed for readers coming to Ukrainian literature for the first time as well as for those who already know it. The Ukrainian names of the forest beings are kept rather than flattened into nymphs and goblins, and explained where they appear.

It includes:

- a new verse translation, in blank verse for the dialogue and rhyme where Ukrainka sings

- a translator's introduction on the play, its author, and the choices behind this English text

- footnotes throughout, kept light enough to read past

- a substantial back commentary, scene by scene, on symbolism, folklore, and the passages where the Ukrainian will not go quietly into English

- a glossary of the forest beings, with the Ukrainian terms

- a pronunciation guide

Translated from the Ukrainian by Serhii Sakal, whose previous translation is Taras Shevchenko's The Artist.