Pass me the microphone and I’ll say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have created a wonderful world, and please accept, on this occasion, sincere greetings from US Air, and from CNN, and from the CIA, and the Uruguay drug mafia, and the Romanian Securitate, and from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and from the millions of killers in all the prisons of the world as well as the tens of millions still at large, and from the five thousand Sarajevo children born of rape, who will, after all, grow up some day, and—onward and upward, brave new world, and that, actually, is all I wanted to say, thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen, have a good flight.”
When I was young, I dreamed of such a death: plane crash over the Atlantic, an aircraft dissolving in the air and the ocean—no grave, no trace. Now I wish with all my heart that the plane land safely: I like to watch the tall, sinewy old man with the hooked nose and deeply furrowed lines running down from his eyes, the way he takes the nylon bag with a tennis racket on its gut and pushes it into the overhead bin; and the Spanish-looking brunette with the unbuttoned leather coat—she’s on board with two children and while she removes the smaller one from her backpack carrier and sets him on the chair, the other one, a girl of about five, narrow tanned face in a baroque frame of promisingly capricious curls, flashes her eyes and her smile up and down the aisle in all directions, glowing with excitement—her first trip!—and her eyes stop on me:
“Hi!” she shouts happily.
“Hello there!” say I.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut at the age of twelve, yet, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has spent some time in the USA lecturing as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. After the publication of her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence,” she has been living in Kyiv as a freelance author. She has authored seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Among her numerous acknowledgments are the Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize (1997), the MacArthur Grant (2002), the Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Ukrainian National Award, the Order of Princess Olha (2009), and many other national awards.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Halyna Hryn is an author, translator, editor, and researcher. She is the editor of Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context, translator of the novels Peltse and Pentameron by Volodymyr Dibrova, editor of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies, and a lecturer at Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research interests center on Soviet Ukrainian literature and cultural politics of the 1920s.
Forthcoming titles by Oksana Zabuzhko:
Museum of Abandoned Secrets
Oh Sister, My Sister
Copyright
Text copyright © 1996 Zhoda
English translation copyright © 2011 by Amazon Content Services LLC
Cover art © Rostyslav Luzhetskyy
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko was first published in 1996 by Zhoda in Kyiv as Pol´ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns´koho seksu.
An excerpt from Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex appeared in AGNI 53, Spring 2001.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn.
First published in English in 2011 by AmazonCrossing.
Published by AmazonCrossing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781611090086
ISBN-10: 1611090083
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010918615