The Complete Early Poetry Collections of Pavlo Tychyna and The Grand Harmony by Bohdan Ihor Antonych represent one more milestone in Michael Naydan's long and impressive history of promoting Ukrainian poetry (as well as Russian poetry) among readers unfamiliar with the Ukrainian language. Both books are re-editions of volumes that had long become unavailable after enjoying an enviable success a few years earlier. Almost unknown outside of Ukraine and of the community of international Ukrainian studies, Tychyna (1891–1967) and Antonych (1909–1937) were two of the finest poets and most influential figures in 20th-century Ukrainian literature.

Despite his being one of the fundamental figures in the present canon of modern Ukrainian literature and one of those several writers who clearly deserve to achieve the recognition of an international audience, Tychyna gained for himself the reputation of one of the most controversial and enigmatic Ukrainian intellectuals of the Soviet era. On the one hand, he can be seen as a perfect incarnation of opportunism, enjoying all the privileges of the Soviet literary establishment while most of his talented fellow writers were being physically eliminated. On the other hand, the innovative character of his early poetic legacy and its unquestionable aesthetic appeal have guaranteed him an everlasting success among both literary scholars and general readers. Naydan's translation of Tychyna's complete early collections will acquaint readers with both the very initial phase of Tychyna's literary production, which includes the late symbolist poetry he wrote in the late 1910s, and his collections of the early and mid- 1920s, the ones he wrote before his conversion to Socialist Realism at the beginning of the 1930s. The book contains some of the most quoted and beloved texts of modern Ukrainian literature, as well as some lesser known texts which are fundamental for a thorough understanding of Tychyna's complex literary path. The importance of Naydan's undertaking is thus unquestionable.

Antonych, a poet from western Ukraine whose life was prematurely cut short by health problems at the age of 28, managed to become a cult figure during his lifetime and to remain one throughout the Soviet period, during a large part of which his name could not be mentioned in publications, up to the present day. The Grand Harmony is a short collection of religious poems, written in 1932 and 1933, which walk the fine line between faith and the deification of art that is so typical of the modernist poetic mind.

The two books follow a similar approach to poetry translation. Confronting the original Ukrainian text with Naydan's English versions, one is prone to conclude that the translator was guided by the desire to bring his reader as close as possible to the semantic texture of Antonych's and Tychyna's poetic worlds, favoring the direct rendering of images and motifs over an attempt to recreate their sound dimensions with the means of the target language. This does not mean, of course, that Naydan has not tried to achieve a truly poetic level in his translations, which he has surely done successfully. In the case of Tychyna, Naydan's translation strategy is in harmony with his determination as translator to provide his readers with an English version of the original collections in their entirety, rather than selecting the most famous, innovative or translatable poems.

While some of Naydan's translations have appeared as anthologies such as his 2010 The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych (Bucknell UP, 2010), the principle of the complete translation of collections is probably what one would expect in the case of better known authors. One is left to wonder whether such an endeavor would not have benefitted from the inclusion of the Ukrainian originals as a parallel text, as was the case with some of Naydan's previous books of poetry in translation. This would have also granted readers familiar with other Slavic languages and with a knowledge of Cyrillic—likely one of the key target groups of these publications—the chance to get a more defined impression of the sound texture of the original, and of the difficulties with which the translator was confronted. A very interesting aspect of Naydan's work as a translator is his decision to include variants, philological explanations and commentaries in footnotes, especially in his translations of Tychyna. This helps the reader navigate the several cultural and linguistic difficulties of the texts, as do the informative introductions to both volumes, clearly tailored to an audience with little previous knowledge of Ukrainian and Slavic cultural history.

The first and most obvious of the two books is their contribution to the slow but steady growth of interest in Ukrainian literature among non-specialists, both inside and outside of the Slavists’ community. Although the poetry of Antonych had already been partially translated into English before (see the 1977 Ardis edition with an introduction by Bohdan Rubchak) and Tychyna has recently been translated by Steve Komarnyckyj (Poetry Salzburg, 2012), one will certainly not deny that the availability of more than one translation, possibly guided by different approaches to the rendering of poetic texts in other languages, will benefit the dissemination of Tychyna's work among readers of English. This is particularly relevant in the case of the two recent translations of Tychyna. While Naydan has chosen to keep the modification of the direct semantic construction of the originals to a minimum, Komarnyckyj has adopted a more personal translation approach, recreating the poetic qualities of Tychyna's texts in his own manner. This has resulted, however, in a considerable estrangement of the translation from the original, the strong immediate appeal of Komarnyckyj's poetic language notwithstanding.

Naydan's latest volumes, as well as his previous translations of the same poets and other fundamental representatives of modern and contemporary Ukrainian poetry, are without doubt a strong contribution to the international dissemination of both Tychyna and Antonych, which, one hopes, will facilitate their long awaited inclusion in the canon of European modernist poetry.