Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
from Prayers: 1
Translated from the Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk and the author
Soul of truth
settle down
inside us,
wash the blindness
from our eyes.
Enter our frailties,
place the leaf of healing
on them, make our bones
howl with immortality.
Heal doubt and pain
and strip the husk
from Heaven
whose drops of light
can dowse our thirst
for You.

Bohdan Boychuk (1927–2017) published ten books of poetry in Ukrainian, not including his 2007, two-volume Collected Poems. He was also the author of nine novels; at least eight plays, several of which were gathered in a selected edition in 2013, and many translations from English, Polish, Spanish and Russian. He edited the literary magazines Suchasnist (Modernity; 1961–1973) and Svito-vyd (Worldview; 1990–1999) and co-edited, with Bohdan Rubchak, the major anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry Coordinates. Mark Rudman and David Ignatow translated Memories of Love: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Boychuk, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 1989. In the last decades of his life, Boychuk divided his time between Kiev and Glen Spey, New York.

Bohdan Rubchak was born in 1927 in western Ukraine and now lives in New York City. He has written six volumes of poetry, two novels, eight plays, and has served as literary editor of the Ukrainian magazine Suchasnit. He has collaborated on translations of poetry into English with Davis Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, and Mark Rudman, among others.

Askold Melnyczuk—the founding editor of AGNI, for which he received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing—is the author of four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, is forthcoming from Mad Hat in summer 2025. A book of selected nonfiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by Harvard University Press in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott and is coeditor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. He's the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award for fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Also the founder of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. (updated 5/2025)