Khrystia Vengryniuk - Selections from "About My Old White Drake"

Celebrated Ukrainian poet Khrystia Vengryniuk offers three selections from her poetry collection, About My Old White Drake. Translated from Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan, these three poems from Khrystia Vengryniuk’s About My Old White Drake explore themes of companionship, longing, and the transient nature of joy and connection.

Selections from “About My Old White Drake”
translated from Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan

My old white drake comes to me
As I lie in bed like in someone else’s cocoon,
And I struggle to rise,
As if I’m truly upside down.
He brings water and looks so wistful.
He wipes the sweat from my forehead with his light hands
and seems to bring his lips even closer,
Although he never says anything…
Only when I sleep do I hear
How he untangles my braids
And sits quietly nearby
So that his legs are hidden underneath the blanket.
I want to tell him that everything is alright,
That there really is no pain,
That it’s just so nice to lie down sometimes…
And I see how tenderly he looks at me
And folds my hands
Into prayer…

***

My old white drake
Appeared to me in such a joyful dream,
I knew that he would come today
And bring good news.
As I waited, I looked at the door,
Sitting on the rug,
But he knocked on the window. Smiling.
I gave him my hand. He climbed inside
And emptied a bag onto the table,
Carrying different kinds of grapes.
He set aside some for me in a bowl,
And poured the rest into a bucket,
And he began with his webbed feet
To press the wine from them.
And he was so happy, just as I had dreamed.
And when the wine fermented, we drank it together.
Only then did we talk about sins
And take in the dawn a little longer.

***

My old white drake
Didn’t come home yesterday,
He was just gazing at the sky,
To see whether the sun had yet to rise,
And he did so sadly upon my made bed,
As if he wanted to take my hand
And walk with me for so long,
Passing through heavy mounds of sorrow
and unfamiliar footsteps.
Maybe we would find some place,
Where we would lean our heads on each other’s shoulders,
Maybe we could even hear
The long-legged elves singing,
Swinging on branches or vines.
But he didn’t know how to say it,
When I poured coffee into a deep cezve,
And the night appeared on our lips:
It would burn at the tip of the tongue,
Or trickle down our chests.
And it was so dark everywhere,
Only the old white drake
Shone across from me.
And everything remained the same
Once daylight already came.

Khrystia Vengryniuk

Khyystia Vengryniuk is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated female poets and hails from Chernivtsi, the hometown of Paul Celan. Her words have appeared in English in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Apofenie, and are forthcoming in The Translation Review.

Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan recently translated Oleh Sentsov’s hunger strike diary which will be published by Deep Vellum later this year. Kate Tsurkan’s own writing and translations have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Julia Weber