"You gave me a soul, as a sharp knife gives a voice to the quiet willow bough."
A young man walks into a Volhynian forest at the start of spring and cuts a willow branch to make a flute. The forest answers him - and one of its beings, Mavka, wakes from her winter sleep because she has heard the sound.
What follows is not a fairy tale. Lukash is a farmer's nephew with a mother, a field, and a hungry winter ahead. Mavka is not human and cannot become one. Between them stand a mother who needs a daughter-in-law who can work, a woman named Kylyna who can, and a household that must eat. Lesya Ukrainka refuses to make either side the villain - and that refusal is what has kept this play alive for over a century.
Written in ten days in the summer of 1911, in exile and in failing health, THE FOREST SONG (Лісова пісня) is the masterpiece of Ukraine's greatest woman of letters and one of the great verse dramas of European literature. It is a play about love, betrayal, poverty, and what survives destruction - set in a living landscape peopled by the beings of Ukrainian folk belief: Lisovyk the forest lord, Rusalka of the water, Perelesnyk the fire-spirit, and the Zlydni, the small grey miseries that move into a house and never leave.
About this edition
- A new verse translation - faithful to Ukrainka's rhythm and voice, and readable straight through with no prior knowledge of Ukraine.
- A full introduction to Ukrainka, the play, and the Volhynian world it came from.
- A running commentary - folklore, symbolism, and emotional subtext, placed where you need it, never in your way.
- A glossary of the forest beings, with their real place in Ukrainian belief.
- Ukrainian names and concepts are kept and explained, not replaced with generic fantasy equivalents.
- The translator's decisions are shown openly - including the ones that could not be won.
For readers of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, and Yeats - and for anyone who wants to meet Ukrainian literature at full strength rather than in adaptation.
"No! I am alive! I shall live for ever!"
Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913) wrote poetry, drama, and criticism in a dozen languages while ill for most of her life. The Forest Song was her last completed play and the one she loved best.
