In his early, short bibliography The Koran in Slavonic (New York, 1937), the Slavic Studies scholar Avrahm Yarmolinsky asserts that there is no translation of the Qur’an into any of the Slavic languages, including Ukrainian. However, just two decades later, the well-known scholar of the Qur’an and translator Muhammad Hamidullah mentions an enigmatic Ukrainian interpretation in the list of the translations into various languages he published as a supplement to his own work (Le Saint Coran, Paris, 1959). According to Hamidullah, this translation was produced by someone called ‘Volodymyr Lezevycz’; however, intriguingly, in the 1981 and 1989 editions of Le Saint Coran, there is no longer any mention of a Ukrainian translation. Nobody else seems to have been able to find any trace of this work since; perhaps Hamidullah updated his list because he himself began to have doubts about the attribution.
However, behind the Iron Curtain that seperated Soviet Ukraine from the rest of the world some scholars, such as Yarema Polotniuk (1935–2012), a graduate of the Oriental Studies department of Leningrad State University, have been aware of the existence of a Ukranian translation of the Qur’an for some time. In the early 1960s, Polotniuk discovered a manuscript Qur’an translation (actually, a typed copy) in the Vasyl Stefanyk Scientific Library, in the collection of the most important Ukrainian academic network, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (SSS, est. 1873). What exactly was this manuscript, and how did it find its way there?
The typed manuscript, which comprises over 1,000 folios, was apparently part of the archives of someone named Oleksander Abranczak Lysenec’kyj. Interestingly, it is produced in Latin script, rather than Cyrillic, which conforms to modern Ukrainian usage; this raises the question of whether it was produced in Latin script intentionally (there were some attempts to introduce Latin script for Ukrainian in the first half of the twentieth century, so this would not have been all that unusual) or for technical reasons – simply because of the lack of a proper Cyrillic typewriter. Lysenec’kyj, the author, was born around 1880 somewhere in Galicia (in Western Ukraine or Eastern Poland), which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918. After a brief period as a student at Lviv University (according to one of his own letters found in the archive, he had to abandon his studies due to lack of money), he became a translator. It seems that Lysenec’kyj was able to read an impressive number of languages: not only German, Polish and Ukrainian, which were all in local usage, but also Romanian, Hungarian, Armenian and even Sanskrit. For some time he worked in translation bureaus based in Lviv and Cracow; but in 1922, after Lviv became a part of Poland, Lysenec’kyj donated all his archives (including his Qur’an translation) to the aforementioned Shevchenko Scientific Society (SSS) and left Lviv for Warsaw. No further details of his life are known. In 1940, after another major political change, when Lviv became a part of the USSR, these archives were moved to the newly established Vasyl Stefanyk Scientific Library, where they remain today. This might explain Hamidullah’s somewhat enigmatic reference to a ‘Lezevycz’ translation: the works of the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Lesevych (1837–1905) are also held in the SSS collection, in the same section. Lesevych was also interested in oriental religions (primarily Buddhism), so it would be very easy for Hamidullah’s informant, whoever it was, to make a mistake when reviewing the collection and simply mix up Lesevycz with the completely unknown Lysenec’kyj, erroneously ascribing his Qur’an to the more famous figure.
Why did Lysenec’kyj undertake such a work? His paternal name (or part of the surname), ‘Abranczak’, sounds somewhat Muslim: although the name is very rare, it is normally used among Karaite Jews or Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, so this might explain his interest. In terms of when the translation was undertaken, we do have more concrete information on this front: all of the folios are dated, and we know that the author started his work on October 29, 1913 and completed it on April 24, 1914, just six months before the city of Lviv, where he lived at the time, became part of the frontline in World War One.
The title states the translation is ‘from the Arabic’, which is rather exciting, but it turns out that in reality the text is based solely on Max Henning’s German translation (first edition: Leipzig, 1901), and it follows his verse division system, which is based on G. Flügel’s edition of the Qur’an. Lysenec’kyj even refers to some German words in brackets, for example, ‘hinfällig’ (in Ukrainian ‘pokhylyj’, ‘the obsolete one’), which is used by Henning to translate the Arabic ḥaraḍan in Q. 12:85. Lysenec’kyj’s reliance on Henning’s translation becomes even more evident when you look at his translation at the structural level: for Q. 2:138, where Henning says ‘Die Taufe Allahs (haben wir), und was ist besser als Allahs Taufe? Und wahrlich, ihm dienen wir’, Lysenec’kyj’s Ukranian translation provides: ‘Kreshchenje Allahha (majemo my), a shcho є lіpshe vіd khreshchennia Allaha? І spravdі, jomu mі sluzhymo’ (‘The Baptism of Allah (we have), and what is better than Baptism of Allah? And surely, to Him we do serve’). While Henning use the typical Christian German term ‘Die Taufe’ (‘The Baptism’), Lysenec’kyj applies the Old Slavonic ‘Kreschchenije’, which is widely used in his local Ukrainian dialect. (Lysenec’kyj used the local ‘Galician’ dialect, which is somewhat different from the language used in other parts of Ukraine that fell within the Russian Empire and, later, the USSR.) His use of ‘Kreschchenije’ is far from an isolated instance: he uses plenty of other dialect words throughout the translation, such as, for example, ‘pomana’ (‘error’), ‘kupno’ (‘totally’), and ‘hisen’ (‘profit’).
Lysenec’kyj’s rendition of imām (Q. 2:124, transated by Henning as ‘Hohepriester’) as ‘Archipastyr’ (‘Archpastor’), demonstrates one of the other features of the target text, his use of Christian terms. This, combined with his use of words from the local Galician dialect, means that his translation reads like a Greek Catholic prayer book.
In addition to relying on Henning for the core text of his translation, Lysenec’kyj also faithfully copied all of Henning’s notes, even those where he reveals his weak understanding of the text. Thus, for al-thaqalāni So far, suras 1 and 68 of Lysenec’kyj’s translation have been published, both of which were edited prior to publication by the author of this thread’ (lit. ‘two weighty things’, Q. 55:31), where Henning has: ‘Warum ist Menschen und Dschinn so genannt warden, ist nicht bekannt’, the Ukrainian translation accords with this, commenting: ‘Czomu ludy j dzyny nazvani tak – ne znaju’ (‘Why humans and jinns are named so – I do not know’).
Does this text have any value today, given that it is a translation from German rather than the original Arabic? For sure, the answer is yes. First of all, it speaks to the reputation and dissemination of Henning’s famous translation and its early reception in German-speaking areas; secondly, the target text, written in a highly eloquent literary style of Galician Ukrainian is of interest in its own right. There is no doubt that this translation will be made publicly available, either through digitalization, or even more likely, through the publication of a print edition. So far, suras 1 and 68 of Lysenec’kyj’s translation have been published, both of which were edited prior to publication by the author of this thread. This is a translation with a fascinating and complicated history: the text was produced in Austro-Hungary, donated to a library in Poland, and then moved elsewhere by the Soviet authorities. It has survived Nazi occupation and then a second Soviet invasion, and now finally awaits publication in independent Ukraine, while one again facing the challenges of war, as are many other of the country’s cultural monuments.
Mykhaylo Yakubovych