[mova] [Fwd: Oksana Zabuzhko at Columbia today]

Mon Apr 25 07:52:30 EDT 2005

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Oksana Zabuzhko at Columbia today
From:    "Diana Howansky" <dhh2 at columbia.edu>
Date:    Mon, April 25, 2005 7:49 am
To:      harriman-news at columbia.edu
         othereurope at columbia.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today, the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University

presents the Ukrainian writer and poet

OKSANA ZABUZHKO

Oksana Zabuzhko will be reading, in English, from her prizewinning 
collection of stories, “Oh Sister, My Sister,” as well as commenting on 
the recent Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Zabuzhko’s works also include 
the best-selling "Field Work in Ukrainian Sex," which was widely
translated in Central and Eastern Europe; four collections of poetry -- 
one in English translation ("A Kingdom of Fallen Statues"); two volumes 
of literary criticism; and two collections of essays. She received the 
Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize in 1997, as well as numerous 
other awards.

When: Monday, April 25 at 6:30pm
Where: Room 1512 (15th floor), International Affairs Building, Columbia 
University, 420 W. 118th Street

Free and open to the public. For more information, contact Diana
Howansky at ukrainianstudies at columbia.edu or (212)854-4697.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more information about Oksana Zabuzhko, see:

http://www.zabuzhko.com/

http://ukraine.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/23417

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt of Oksana Zabuzhko’s “Girls” (Divchatka), translated from 
Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk:

Darka saw her in the trolley, the sweaty, June-soaked trolley, brimming 
with people and their smells: sweet, almost corpselike, female, heavy, 
equestrian, yet oddly palatable, and even stimulating, sexual,
distinctly male. Suddenly all the smells switched off, leaving only a 
girlish profile on the sunny side of the car, angular as a Braque: 
abrupt, soaring cheekbones, a fine pug nose, mulatto lips, and a sharp, 
childlike fist of a chin—a capricious, fragile geometry which
occasionally seeps from an artist's pen, piercing the heart, as when in 
childhood you pick up a new Christmas ornament (I remember it: a
blinding white ballerina, tutu frozen in an upward sweep, an
inconceivable liquid legato of arms and legs, so delicate and
small-fingered that touching them with your brutish five-year old's 
stumps seemed blasphemous), such faces catapult into the world in order 
to reawaken us to life's fragility. She had the disproportionately long 
(instead of Braque, Modigliani) neck of a wary fawn (Fee, Fi, Fo, Fawn 
chanted the other girls, but Darka couldn't bring herself to say it: the 
fawn was simply Effie and none other, because these slopes and angles, 
lines pushed to the breaking point, suggested something else entirely). 
It was the same kind of neck that had emerged from the open collar 
(stiff, angular, extending over the shoulders in that style from the 
seventies) of the school uniform, flashing cleavage. Ah, Effie the fawn! 
In the chemistry classroom her spot was near the window where the light 
fell on her face and neck that same way, trailing down the trench  between
her breasts. It deepened as she bent over, giving the sun her  downy left
cheek. Only, Darka realized now that this couldn't be her  childhood
friend, that the real Effie would be well over thirty, and yet  amazingly
enough, it was her, newly returned in her
incomparable-not-quite-twenty-year old prime: every woman's beauty has 
(like every figure, its ideal size, where one pound more or less makes 
all the difference) its own
moment of perfection, one in which everything opens to the fullest, and 
which can change in a minute like the bloom on a desert flower or may,  in
happier circumstances, depending on care and watering, last for years 
(so, optimistically, thinks Darka, whose expenses for moisturizing, for 
creams and lotions, have recently begun exceeding her outlay for
clothing) and Effie at the start had been junior-sized. Yet who knows 
what life turned her into eventually? Effie: ephebe, the word exactly.

Effie or non-Effie, on the sunny side of the trolley senses she's being 
watched and turns her head (the butterfly brush of lashes), glance sharp 
as an elbow: Look, look, said Effie, sweeping up her sleeve, see how 
sharp, want to feel it? And here too—thrusting forward her neck and, 
already disheveled and spooked, pushing out her collarbones: held  breath,
the gaze dead, strange, a little frightened, whether through its  own
daring trustfulness or because of your unpredictability: she loves  me,
she loves me not (or, as she played it: love, kiss, spit)—of course  it's
not her, and neither is this one as young as she looked in
profile—Darka turns her eyes away, and looks politely out the window 
where at this moment out of the dappled green of Mariinsky Park rises  the
monument to Vatutin—dull, bald, and smug, a sculptural epitaph to 
Khrushchev's era: a peer, Darka sneers (the monument went up the year  she
was born)—and at that moment she decides about the school reunion (a 
stiff envelope with a gold seal, an invitation, removed yesterday from 
the mailbox, and uncertainly set aside—there will be time to think about 
it), dammit, she'll go to the reunion though the prospect wearies her: 
what could be interesting about this pathetic act of self-assertion 
before the face of one's own adolescence, what's intriguing about the 
gray and the bald blissfully morphing to boyos again, and artificial, 
elaborately decked-out women who sneak glances at your wrinkles, hoping 
they have fewer themselves? But she'll go—whatever happened to
Fawn—Effie—Faron? Suddenly, she needed to know.

(Published in the online journal “Words Without Borders,” the online 
version of which can be found at
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/bio.php?author=Oksana+Zabuzhko)

-- 
Diana Howansky
Staff Associate
Ukrainian Studies Program
Columbia University
Room 1209, MC3345
420 W. 118th Street
New York, NY  10027
(212) 854-4697
ukrainianstudies at columbia.edu
http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/ukrainianstudies/