In a collection that coheres pivotal ideas about womanhood and history with impeccable craft, Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko has once again impressed her brilliance upon the English-speaking world with the newly released Your Ad Could Go Here. At Asymptote, we are incredibly proud to present this volume of stunning short stories as our Book Club selection for April. Known equally for her adeptness in criticism and philosophy as her accomplishments in poetry and fiction, Zabuzhko’s refined perspective on Ukrainian identity and feminism, enlivening her characters and narratives, is a gift for readers everywhere.
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Your Ad Could Go Here by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated from the Ukrainian, edited by Nina Murray, Amazon Crossing, 2020
As I read Oksana Zabuzhko’s newest collection of short stories, Your Ad Could Go Here, I recalled the scene in Paradise Lost when Eve, new to the world, is startled to encounter her own reflection in a pool of water:
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; ‘What thou seest,
‘What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself
Like Milton’s Eve, Zabuzhko’s protagonists—invariably women—turn their attention inward, without losing sight of their physical selves. They find strength, power, faults—and a wellspring of self-love, despite being riven by the natural contradictions of a full life.
The longest story in the collection, “The Tale of the Guelder Rose Flute,” is modeled on a traditional folk tale. This retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story, translated by Halyna Hryn and Nina Murray, replaces the brothers with a complex pair of sisters, and, again like Milton, draws sympathy for the sinner. The eight stories that make up the book are by turns realistic, surreal, and supernatural, and they conspire to place the collection right at the border where our world gives way to magic.
Here, Zabuzhko continues the interrogation of gender and Ukrainian identity that has characterized her decades of writing and scholarship. (Her 1996 debut novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, also translated by Halyna Hryn, mapped the contours of Ukrainian womanhood, touched off a fiery national debate, and remained atop the country’s bestseller list for over a decade.) Along with Hryn and Murray, Askold Melnyczuk, Marco Carynnyk, and Marta Horban contributed translations to this collection, and Murray, as editor, made seamless their work and the transitions between the book’s three sections. Zabuzhko’s distinct style is a through line among the various translators’ approaches.
Whitewater sentences cascade around banks of commas and drop the reader into new altitudes. Tossed-out asides contain a depth of experience and reveal Zabuzhko’s dedication to her theme. In “I, Milena,” television host Milena reckons, frighteningly, with public performance and a simulacrum of herself. A sentence sketches her marriage:
Since then, the TV delivered lots of various “pictures,” as Milena’s photojournalist husband (who identified himself, more pretentiously, as a “photographic artist” on his business cards) called them, and he was now in the habit of spending his evenings in the bedroom with the door closed, as if he were in a darkroom—only the light there was not red but, if you looked at it from the street, a ghoulish blue—picking over the buttons on his remote and hopping from channel to channel like a bank manager calling up subordinates on the intercom, and when Milena would poke her head into the half light of the bedroom to ask what to make for supper, he would grin at her with his teeth colored by the glow of the TV screen.
The women of these stories observe their own actions and feelings amid both internationally significant events (the 2004 Orange Revolution) and more quotidian turning points (a daughter’s teenage years). But their preoccupation is both intellectual and physical: Zabuzhko’s characters are unapologetically embodied. Their complicated and evolving relationships with physicality are treated with respect, as an integral component of selfhood, whether they’re embracing their own sexuality or confronting a loss of beauty.
Taken together, these stories push for a way forward for Ukrainian women and celebrate the country’s activists. “An Album for Gustav” poignantly illustrates the difficulty—and necessity—of translating for a global audience the Ukrainian history and context that erupted during the Orange Revolution, a popular resistance movement to protest the 2004 presidential run-off election. Zabuzhko’s stories, and their expert translations, help do that job, as they knit together Ukraine’s past and hoped-for future. Despite the subtle and overt activism at work, Zabuzhko keeps looking back: she articulates the importance of Ukraine’s democratic heritage. In the story that gives the book its title, she pines for disappearing craftsmanship. The protagonist is also a writer:
Understanding, in fact, is my job, that’s what writers are for—to try to understand everyone and everything and put this understanding into words, finished to the gossamer fineness of a rose petal, words made supple and obedient, words cut to hold the reader’s mind like a well-made glove that fits like second skin.
It’s impossible not to read this as Zabuzhko’s own mission statement, given how well she succeeds in this collection. Her luxurious prose indulges Eve as she reflects, literally and figuratively, on herself, contemplating thoughts, actions, and a bare body that are all her own. Zabuzhko holds readers rapt as Eve—women—shucks off the notion of being made in anyone’s image, and we’re still rapt when, finding fierce power in her own experience, she finally looks up and holds our gaze.
Allison Braden is a writer and Spanish translator. In addition to representing Argentina as an editor-at-large for Asymptote, she is a contributing editor to Charlotte Magazine and an editorial assistant for the academic journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. Her writing has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Asymptote, and Spanish and Portuguese Review, among others.
*****
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