Lukash, Mykola

Lukash, Mykola [Лукаш, Микола; Lukaš], b 19 December 1919 in Krolevets, Chernihiv gubernia, d 29 August 1988 in Kyiv. Translator. He graduated from Kyiv University (1941) and the Kharkiv Institute of Foreign Languages (1947), and until 1953 he taught German, French, and English in Kharkiv’s postsecondary schools. For most of his life Lukash worked as a translator of literature. He translated into Ukrainian from 18 European languages, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Lope de Vega’s plays, poetry by Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, Guillaume Apollinaire, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Robert Burns, Adam Mickiewicz, and Julian Tuwim, and works by many other writers. He also wrote on lexicographical matters. Through his masterful translations, he restored into use many 17th- and 18th-century words and introduced neologisms into the contemporary Ukrainian literary language. In 1973 he was expelled from the Writers' Union of Ukraine and the editorial board of the journal Vsesvit for offering to serve the ailing Ivan Dziuba’s sentence of political imprisonment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Savchyn, Valentyna. Mykola Lukash – podvyzhnyk ukraïns'koho khudozhn'oho perekladu (Lviv 2014)

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]