Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
The King of Tasmania
Translated from the Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk
“The last Tasmanian was destroyed at
the start of the 19th century.”
—From a history book
I am he. I am the last. That means I’m king.
There is still a Tasman Sea and Tasmania.
A country must have a king—
This is the part I was sentenced to play.
Every crown rests on bones. Not for medals
Will I raise this sepulchre of skulls,
But to record how they suffered: my people.
These human skulls I snatched from the dogs.
From the dogs, the trees…Study the gardens:
Each apple-tree in them lapped native blood.
They slew us for fertilizer, certain
Our bodies nourished sweet fruit. A bargain.
There is no more fertilizer. I gather bones
For my pyramid. Dreadful.
Soon I’ll sit higher than the noblest trees.
I, the king; below me, my people.
Wherever I turn: foreign money.
The only familiar souls are the sleek kangaroos.
In them ancestors blossom. When I die
We’ll meet in green furrows.
Far from here foreigners race to my country
To poach on our fields, spade gardens.
I’ll be the customs man bribed by their gin.
The worship of kings, don’t they know, is a duty.
To them I seem mad. That’s nothing new.
My pyramid grows, and it grows.
There is a sacred prophecy I pursue:
A tower will outlast the empire.
Though my nation’s extinct, the original faith
Of the fathers and grandfathers survives:
Who hopes for swelled harvests from corpses
Reaps nothing but corpses on corpses and dies.
Mykola Rudenko (1920–2004) was a Ukrainian writer, Soviet dissident, World War II veteran, human rights activist, and philosopher. He served as secretary of the Ukrainian Writers Union and worked in the tradition of “poetry in opposition” begun by Skovoroda in the eighteenth century. In addition to seven volumes of verse, Rudenko published novels and several popular books on science and economics. His “Metaphysical Poems” includes a mathematical explanation of black holes.
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)