The Feeling of One Family
by Pavlo Tychyna
Source: A New Life Begun: Prose Poetry and Essays of the 1920s-1930s, Progress, 1987;
Translated: Alex Miller;
HTML Markup: For marxists.org in February, 2002.
Pavlo Tychina (1891-1967) was a Ukrainian Soviet poet. In his numerous poems and verses published in collections: Plough (1920), The Party Is Leading Us (1934), The Feeling of One Family (1938), Steel and Tenderness (1941), To Win and Live (1942), We Are Mankind's Conscience (1957), Communism's Clear Goals (1961)--Tychina glorifies the socialist revolution, the creative labour of the modern hero, the friendship among the Soviet peoples.
I'll stand my ground. They need not lure me
Down some untrodden local byway.
My rainbow bridge to all the peoples
Soars like a great, majestic skyway.
It is more lasting than all others,
Its piers are firm and without number,
And its foundations scarcely tremble
Even to the echoing mountain thunder.
Peal follows peal, reverberating;
Earth listens with the seas and oceans.
But by the friendship of the peoples
That bridge was built between the nations.
For language is the spark igniting
An all-illuminating fire;
It is the taste of fresh spring water,
Full of a strange and magic power.
Drink deep and often! Slake your thirst
With draughts of water clear and cool,
And say, without constraint and freely:
All languages are beautiful!
Take any one you care to mention;
It need not be too hard to tame;
For though a word may sound quite different,
Its root and essence are the same.
At first, I may not find it easy
To make the new words knockle down.
Then--breakthrough! And the foreign language
Flows no less freely than my own.
For language is not empty verbiage,
Or dictionaries cold and dry,
But toil, grief, bliss. In words is latent
The feeling of one family.
The forests' murmur, the meadows' flowering,
The people's joy unlimited.
Words, ever since time immemorial,
Have been communion's living thread.
Now, any foreign word you fancy
With your rich language you may blend,
And all because the working people
Emerged victorious in the end!
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