Poetry
Вянок
Not translated into English
Maksim Bahdanovich · 1914
Opening lines
Вы, хто любіце натрапіць
Між страніц старых, пажоўклых
Кнігі, ўжо даўно забытай,
Блеклы, высахшы лісток, —
Праглядзеце гэты томік:
Засушыў я на паперы
Краскі, сьвежыя калісьці,
Думак шчырых і чуцьця.
You who love to come upon,
between the old and yellowed pages
of a book long since forgotten,
a faded, withered leaf,
look through this little volume:
I have dried upon the paper
the flowers, once fresh,
of sincere thoughts and feeling.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Nearly a hundred lyric and patriotic poems and two long poems, grouped in cycles: the enchanted kingdom of myths and legends, the sounds of the homeland, old Belarus, the cities, thoughts and free thoughts, the old heritage, the madonnas. The chronicler and the copyist figure there the birth of a written heritage, other pieces pose the questions of life and death, and the book acclimatises to Belarusian the sonnet, the triolet, the rondeau, the octave and the terza rima.
Context
The poems were written between 1909 and 1912; the book, first titled “book of selected verse”, came out in early 1914 from Marcin Kukhta's press in Vilnius, but its title page bears 1913. It is dedicated to the memory of a young poet who had died. Two cycles, one on love and death, the other made up of translations, were left out of it and appeared only in 1927, the year of a Vilnius reissue; two facsimiles followed in Minsk, in 1981 and 1985.
Who it is for
One hundred and twenty pages of short poems, in Belarusian, in fixed forms; an announcement from 1914 judged some of them reserved for educated readers.
Prizes and reception
Voted in 2000 the best poetry collection among the hundred Belarusian books of the twentieth century; one critic sees in it a school of classical poetics.
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