I owe my greatest debt to the National Endowment of the Humanities for a Translation Grant, which gave me a year’s sabbatical from teaching to complete versions of all the translations presented here and to work on the scholarly apparatus for the volume. I am grateful to the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York for a research grant to aid in my initial research on the Tychyna translation project. Extra special thanks to the Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, established by the Woskob family, at The Pennsylvania State University, which helped to make this volume a reality. I am grateful to Bohdan Boychuk and Vasyl Barka for assistance on my early work on Tychyna and for educating me on the art of his poetry. I am thankful to Oksana Zabuzhko for going over the first complete manuscript of my translations and for comparing them with the original texts. Thanks also to Mykola Riabchuk, Natalka Bilotserkivets, Viktor Neborak, John Fizer, Maria Zubrytska, and Oksana Tatsyak for sharing their expert knowledge of Tychyna with me, as well as to Lowry Nelson, Jr. for his commentary on Instead of Sonnets and Octaves. My gratitude to Christine Skolnick for editing suggestions on a more recent version of the manuscript, and to Christine Sochocky for her meticulous attention to detail on the final galleys and for some fine suggestions for final emendations.
I wish to thank Penn State’s Pattee Library Interlibrary Loan Office for their kindness in acquiring copies of difficult to find materials. I also thank the following libraries for the courteous assistance of their staffs: Columbia University’s Butler Library, Princeton University’s Firestone Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and especially the U. of Illinois at Urbana Slavic Collection, whose summer research program granted me funding twice to work on this project.
Extra special thanks to Mykhailo Komarnytsky, Natalia Babalyk and to Myroslava Prykhoda for the attentive care they gave to the publication of the original Litopys Publishers bilingual edition of Tychyna in 2000. It could not have happened without them.
My gratitude to Vasyl Byalyk and Alla Perminova for assistance with resolving sticky wickets in the new translations for this volume – and to Svitlana Budzhak-Jones for her excellent suggestions that have made my translation of “Mother Was Pealing Potatoes” significantly better.
The poem “Along the Azure Steppe” first appeared in the literary journal Mr. Cogito. And the two introductions to this volume, the footnotes, and the translations of Tychyna’s first five collections appeared originally in The Complete Early Poetry Collections of Pavlo Tychyna (Lviv: Litopys Publishers, 2000). Some translations have been slightly revised for this edition.