The Bread of Childhood
Grandmother’s pyrohy oozing cherries, the soil
Fragrant with spring,
These are the heart’s embroidered memories
Touched by the cry
Of a crane.
I sit beneath fir-trees and recollect
The sacred village evenings
Grandfather spoke of to me.
“They were truly rich,” he said.
“Something good has been lost since ancient times. But what?
A song? The ring of a sickle,
Life rolled along like a round loaf until time bit
Into it …”
Twilight thickens.
I leave the forest in a dream.
Cranes seem
To dance in the meadow, my childhood
Is delicately embroidered
With stalks of wheat.
Translated by Steve Komarnyckyj
* Pyrohy – in the poet’s region of Ukraine, pyrohy are pies rather than dumplings
****
Ihor Pavlyuk is a prize-winning poet from Volyn, in the north-west of Ukraine. Polissya, where he spent his childhood, is the region he particularly celebrates and elegises in A Flight Over the Black Sea: Selected Poems (Waterloo Press) – and to read these rhythmically English translations by Steve Komarnyckyj is to travel.
One of the possible etymological roots of the word “Ukraine”, Wikipedia tells us, translates as “borderland”. Pavlyuk’s intense focus on place coexists with an interpretation of borders as magically permeable. The Bread of Childhood attracted me from the first encounter because it makes the past so thoroughly present. The speaker doesn’t seem merely to remember childhood but to re-enter it, as if stepping into a magical clearing in the forest, where all the sharp senses of a child are suddenly accessible.
The taste of the cherry pie and the smell of the soil’s springtime thaw ignite the metaphor to become “the heart’s embroidered memories / Touched by the cry / Of a crane”. A synaesthetic imagination connects the crane’s cry with “touch”: the more obvious reading, that the bird’s cry touches the speaker’s heart, is complicated by the image of “embroidered memories”, so that the cry itself seems to turn into a piercing needle. Pale pastry and dark red cherries add their contrasting colours to the “embroidery” image. Pavlyuk here references one of the major decorative arts in Ukraine, and insists on its importance. It’s not merely a lost folk custom but a living art – and the stitching of the poem itself exemplifies some of the technique.
The “sacred village evenings” of the second stanza don’t belong to the speaker’s memories, but those of the grandfather. The grandchild recalls them as if he had been present, though it is the imaginative picture he has conjured that he remembers. Perhaps those “village evenings” are “sacred” to the grandfather because they marked the end of a working day, a time of special camaraderie and release. For the poet, they embody the past he so deeply values. Such social rituals may no longer figure importantly in village life. The poem simply makes them present, without special pleading or nostalgia, and so the effect of time’s border-drawing is again mitigated.
Nostalgia informs the grandfather’s perception but he tries to interrogate it. He goes so far as to assert, “Something good has been lost since ancient times” - and then he pauses and unexpectedly asks, “But what?” His answer seems not to be the song, but the day’s rhythms, symbolised by the sickle, and developed in a marvellous simile: “Life rolled along like a round loaf until time bit / Into it.” This loaf might also be identified with “the bread of childhood”.
When the speaker leaves the forest, his dream-vision remains intact. We’re invited to picture an almost magical realist scene, with the cranes, this time in a flock, appearing to dance in the meadow. The embroidery image also returns, this time to represent the childhood itself. The pattern is enhanced by a beautifully specific detail, the “stalks of wheat”. The theme of nourishment persists, bread and embroidered cloth feeding the imagination.
Landscape, history and culture are interlocked in Pavlyuk’s vision. Political dimensions – national, regional, ecological – are implicit, and deeply felt, but never superficially imposed. When we travel to this Ukraine it’s always our senses that are first awakened and engaged.