Mykola Lukash

Mykola Oleksiyovych Lukash (; 19 December 1919 – 29 August 1988) was a well-known Ukrainian literary translator, theorist, and lexicographer who was born in Krolevets and died in Kyiv. He knew more than 20 languages. Many literary works were successfully translated from the majority of these languages and introduced to the Ukrainian literature by him.

A literary prize, Ars Translationis, was instituted by Vsesvit in 1989 to commemorate Lukash.

Early life and education Lukash was born on 19 December 1919 in the city of Krolevets, which was then part of the Chernigov Governorate in the Russian Empire. He was the son of Oleksiy Yakovych Lukash and Vasylyna Ivaniva (née Onykiienko). He stated specifically to a Jewish friend that he learned Yiddish from looking at both the German and Yiddish versions of an entry in the Literary Encyclopedia. At the start of the war, he was not conscripted into the army due to his poor eyesight and having a damaged leg, but was still required to work on defensive structures in the area west of Kyiv. He then worked as a translator at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Forestry for a year, as a teacher of English and German at the Kharkiv Agricultural Institute for two years, and finally as a teacher of French and German at Kharkiv State University. He was celebrated for managing to recreate the hymns of the tragedy and the drunken banter throughout.

This act cost Lukash dear. He was dismissed from the editorial board of Vsesvit and told that he would be forcibly treated in a special psychiatric hospital. Fortunately these threats were not carried out. On 12 June 1973 the Presidium of the Administration of the Union of Writers of Ukraine voted unanimously to expel Lukash from the Union.

For many years he was effectively under house arrest. He was persecuted in all possible ways and his works stopped being published, depriving him of means of existence. For a long time there was a police officer permanently stationed at the entry to his block who didn’t allow anyone to visit him.

Lukash was reinstated in the Union of Writers of Ukraine on the wave of Perestroika in 1987, when he was almost a dying man. In 1988 he became Laureate of the Maksym Rylsky Literary Prize. Within a few months, on 29 August 1988, Mykola Lukash died.

Legacy He did not live to see the publication of a large volume of his translations which came out under the title “From Boccaccio to Apollinaire” in 1990, and became a kind of monument to Lukash. The compiler of the volume, translator, and translation theorist Mykhailo Moskalenko said that “in Mykola Lukash Ukraine was sent a Mozartian genius in the truest and most exact meaning of the word”. His colleague, prominent Ukrainian translator Hryhoriy Kochur, described him by saying that “people like Lukash are probably born once in several centuries”.