THE CREATIVE HERITAGE OF THE PROMINENT UKRAINIAN INTERPRETER WORLD CLASSICS MYKOLA LUKASH

The article attempts to introduce readers to the biography of the writer-translator and to highlight the creative and translation legacy of Mykola Oleksiyovych Lukash (1919–1988), a prominent Ukrainian writer-interpreter of world classics, lexicographer, linguist, and polyglot. It sheds light on his life and creative path as an outstanding Ukrainian writer and interpreter of world classics, his schooling, and university education. His work as a primary school teacher in a village school in the Kyiv region, where he taught Ukrainian and German, is outlined. The author of the article focuses on Mykola Lukash’s studies at the Kharkiv Pedagogical University of Foreign Languages and the Agricultural Institute. His translation work on the two parts of Johann Wolfgang Goetheʼs “Faust” is described. The peculiarities of Mykola Lukash’s translations of works such as Goetheʼs “Faust”, Giovanni Boccaccioʼs “Decameron”, Miguel de Cervantesʼ “Don Quixote”, Gustave Flaubertʼs “Madame Bovary” and the poetry of Burns and Heine, among others, are outlined. Emphasis is placed on Mykola Lukashʼs knowledge of twenty foreign languages. Attention is drawn to the fact that he was one of the few translators who could work with the original text, not with intermediate Russian translations.It is noted that Mykola Lukash was one of the first in European literature to translate Federico García Lorca’s poetry, written in the Galician dialect of Spanish, into Ukrainian using the Hutsul dialect. Emphasis is placed on the fact that Mykola Lukash translated over a thousand outstanding works of world literature from a hundred authors in twenty languages. He collected a vast amount of lexicographic material and made translations from English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and other languages. It is substantiated that certain concepts from Mykola Lukash’s legacy can be used by modern educators and translators.