Skovoroda - The Garden of Divine Songs and Collected Poetry of Hryhory Skovoroda

M any thanks to the Woskob family for granting permission to use the artwork of Mykola Kumanovsky entitled "DNA of Ukraine" from their private collection of art for the cover of this book.

T he preeminent Ukrainian philosopher and poet Hryhory Skovoroda (1722-1794) strikes me profoundly as a man who found the truth, who found love, who found happiness, all in a simple and rustic way of life with just the clothes on his back and a knapsack containing a Bible. He dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge and through that knowledgewisdom. He saw the interconnectedness of all things, of God with man and nature, of man with nature, of past civilizations with the present. Skovoroda saw Gods holy truth as a continuum stretching from the biblical times of the ancient Hebrews and the greatest thinkers of Ancient Greece and Rometo his contemporary times. Skovoroda, too, saw the Old Testament of the Bible as one great continuum with the New. His is the God of Abraham as well as the God of Christ. Both his Old and New Testament scholarship are formidable in his logical and intuitive pursuit to extrapolate this unity.

It is not for nothing that Skovoroda has been called the Ukrainian Socrates, for he spent most of his life teaching and giving to others freely to help them find their way to God and true happiness. Skovoroda was the planter of the seeds of wisdom that he found in the good books and in his life experiences. At the same time that Kant was shifting focus to the purely rational in neighboring Western Europe, Skovoroda was living his intuitive philosophy of the heart and explicating it to anyone who would listen. In his time Skovoroda appealed to all strata of society, from the poorest peasant to the wealthiest landowners and the most highly educated clergy, for he treated everyone as a special creation and as equal in the eyes of God. This unassuming, learned genius, who felt most at peace in the wilds of nature, lived his life as he preached it, at total peace with himself.

This first volume in a planned three-volume edition of the selected works of Skovoroda, whom I once heard Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky call the first great Slavic poet, has been a labor of love for everyone involved in the task. Skovorodas life and thought have fascinated such luminaries of the Slavic literary world as Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Andrei Bely, and master 20th-century Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna. The impact of Skovoroda in his native Ukraine has transcended legend. This series of volumes will introduce this great poet and thinker to a wider audience and, hopefully, will generate additional interest in one of the greatest Orthodox religious thinkers of his time. The entire project has taken longer than expected since its inception partly because of the complexity of the language of the original texts as well as its ever-increasing scope. The planned three volumes will contain translations of all of Skovorodas extant poetry in the first volume, all of his extant correspondence in the second, and seven of his most seminal philosophical treatises in the third. Many of his letters border on the homiletic and comprise brilliant lyrically philosophical treatises in miniature. They also offer a glimpse into the warm and profound friendship that Skovoroda shared with his disciple Mykhailo Kovalynsky, who is largely responsible for conserving Skovorodas writings for posterity. Several of the poems, especially a number from the Garden of Divine Songs cycle and the poem On the Holy Supper, Or Eternity, are Ukrainian literary Baroque masterpieces of the metaphysical.

Since Skovoroda knew the Bible so thoroughly in so many languages, including Old Church Slavic, Ancient Greek, Ancient Hebrew, and Latin, identification of Biblical quotations, as a result of variations in translation across languages and cultures, presents a significant problem for translators*. Leonid Ushkalov has done an admirable job of identifying Biblical sources in his complete works edition of Skovoroda.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the editors of the 1973 two-volume collected works edition of SkovorodaPovne zibrannia tvoriv (Kyiv) for having managed to publish such a profoundly spiritual author in the rather dismal times of the then virulently anti-religious Soviet Union. Another great debt is owed to the translators of Skovoroda into modern UkrainianValery Shevchuk and Maria Kashuba, who have made my task easier as editor. To resolve numerous sticky wickets I have been able to check these English translations against the 1994 two-volume modern Ukrainian edition of Skovoroda: Hryhorii Skovoroda: Tvory v dvokh tomakh (Kyiv) as well as against the most comprehensive and authoritative volume to date of Skovorodas writings edited by Leonid UshkalovHryhorii Skovoroda: Povna akademichna zbirka tvoriv (Kharkiv: Maidan Publishers, 2011). The notes in all of these modern editions of Skovoroda have been extraordinarily useful. I am especially grateful to Valery Shevchuk, the preeminent Ukrainian writer and one of the leading experts on the life and works of Skovoroda in the world, for providing such a comprehensive and thoughtful introduction to this volume.

The main goal in these translations has been to present the great thinker and poet Skovoroda in an accessible idiom in English while maintaining the poeticality along with some of the archaic feel in the originals. In the poetry, I have tried to include natural end rhymes whenever possible and internal rhymes (sometimes in a compensatory way) in order to convey Skovorodas poeticality without drastically changing his essential meaning. Skovoroda does not, in fact, always use end rhymes (Song No. 3, for example as well as in many of the poems outside of the 30 contained in The Garden of Divine Songs). Words in brackets were added for the sake of rhymes and are not in the original texts. This will allow for more precise quotation for scholars yet permit readers to experience the playfulness of Skovorodas style. While Skovorodas writings may seem archaic to a modern speaker of Ukrainian or Russian, they were written in the scholarly idiom of the philosopher-poets time and function as a testimony to the poet-philosophers extraordinarily expansive and lucid mind.