Ukrainian poet, writer and essayist, was born in 1960 in Ivanovo Frankovsk. He studied in Lviv. In 1985 he established a poetry group Bu Bu Bu, after several years he founded the first post-modernist literary magazine in Ukraine “Wednesday”.
Yuri Andrukhovich has published five novels, four poetry collections and several essay collections. He translates prose and peotry from English, German, Polish and Russian languages. Collaborates with Ukrainian press. He is the winner of numerous Ukrainian and International literary awards, including Harder Prize, Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Angelus Prize and Hannah Arendt Prize.
Just In Between
....it’s a bit like hotel
rooms –
you have to leave by midday,
so we shut the door,
run downstairs
and hand the key in at reception.
But what about the rooms?
What happens to them without us? What happens
to the tangled sheets, that mess,
allthose towels,
pillows,
the ash in the ashtrays?
Do gusts of wind from the window
still blow it?
Does the tap still drip
over the bath? Does
the sweaty mirror brighten at last?
What can you see in it?
(as the Classics would proclaim:
Oh, what I’d give
only to see
what happens to a room
that I’ve left forever!)
Of course, the chambermaid will appear
to wipe away the slightest trace
of us, as if we had never been there.
And she’ll succeed.
Obviously, afterwards
otherothers will come
and be allocated the room.
But what happens in the time between?
Between our leaving and the appearance
of the chambermaid?
In the hotel room
where we lay so close the two of us
breathed so close?