One could not conceive of contemporary Ukrainian literature without Oksana Zabuzhko’s wide-ranging body of work coming to the mind’s forefront. With volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays to her name, her remarkable fusion of lyric and philosophy has earned her the unceasing admiration of both critics and the general public. We were enormously excited to present her latest English-language work, the short story compilation Your Ad Could Go Here, as our April Book Club selection. The eight tales are ripe with her signature eye for detail and acute insight into the heart of human matters, and signify the triumph of an author whose trusted voice remains her greatest tool in combating themes both personal and political. In the following interview, Allison Braden speaks to the volume’s editor, Gabriella Page-Fort, about the significance of Zabuzhko’s oeuvre and the impact of these powerful stories.
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Allison Braden (AB): How did you go about selecting and arranging the stories in this collection? What sorts of criteria, aesthetic or otherwise, did you consider?
Gabriella Page-Fort (GP-F): With topics ranging from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to sexual empowerment and attractive tennis instructors, Your Ad Could Go Here is both wildly entertaining and intensely provocative. Oksana decided which stories to include and in what order, but translators Halyna Hryn, Nina Murray, and Askold Melnyczuk were also part of the conversation about how best to order these stories. The collection’s three central themes—sisterhood, truth, and aging—strike a balance between the personal and the political. The result is powerful: both a fairy-tale reverie and a feminist call to action; the book offers a window on twenty-first-century Ukraine and on ourselves. What would it feel like to have power? What structures that define our lives are worthy of our submission, and what are the true risks of, say, admitting weakness truthfully to a man?
AB: What was it like working with a diverse team of translators? Did you edit their work to create a cohesive narrative voice throughout, or did you welcome stylistic discrepancies from one story to the next?
GP-F: We worked with five different translators for this collection, each bringing their own element of style and theory to the text. This was a really exciting creative challenge. Oksana wrote these stories in a variety of voices, so a single tone for the whole collection would be inappropriate, but we also wanted to make sure the book flowed nicely. Rather than undoing the translators’ elegant individual contributions, Nina, acting as volume editor and an expert in Ukrainian translations and Oksana’s work, and I, with an eye toward an English-language reader, focused on developing patterns, such as consistent logic in punctuation choice, to result in a smooth read without compromising style or the diverse range of voices here.
The author’s grasp of English helped tremendously, as well. Oksana was personally aware of the strengths each translator brought to this collection, and her comments were essential to our editing. It wasn’t until I met Oksana in person, though, that I heard her rhythm and got an ear for it. We had a glorious time together at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2017, and while editing Your Ad Could Go Here, I was distinctly aware of her raspy, gleeful voice in my ear speaking each phrase, leading me away from words she might never use and driving the momentum forward to crest at each story’s zenith. That momentum is one of my favorite things about this book—and Oksana’s writing in general—it’s musical in a way that allows for both operatic swells and dirge-like drones without losing the author’s singular voice.
AB: Zabuzhko’s novels (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex and The Museum of Abandoned Secrets) have also been translated into English. How does this collection complement or add to her corpus, and to English-speaking readers’ experience of it?
GP-F: We now have three of Oksana’s masterworks in English: the singular novel of rebellion (Fieldwork), the epic saga—Ukraine’s twentieth-century history through a personal lens (Museum), and now a set of tightly compressed reverberations from the contradictions of our moment in history (Your Ad), a fractured, chaotic, urgent sister/sinister mix forcing reflection as well as action. All three books are feminist indictments of the patriarchal world we share, and all are richly rewarding gems of literary delight. The theme of distinguishing between truth and falsehood runs through all Oksana’s work—including her journalism, which I hope to someday see published in English—but for me the secret weapon across Oksana’s oeuvre is her delicately sensual flavor of feminism, which eschews all existing models while including all that is glorious about the feminine. The lost “sunshine” glove in the title story in this collection might help demonstrate my point. Our narrator has misplaced one of her treasured gloves—handcrafted in Vienna—and when she returns to seek a replacement, she’s devastated to discover that the master craftsman has died and no one has been trained to replace him; the shop is now selling mass-produced mittens. It becomes a “you can’t go home again” symbol, a paean to lost crafts and the utterly temporary nature of our modern world, but not before an invigorating elegy to the object of beauty. “One wanted to stroke and admire the hand, spreading one’s fingers against the light, making a fist and letting it go—Ah!—and never take such beauty off.” In one visceral sentence we try on power and understand its appeal, its grip on the imagination. To me, Oksana’s work exemplifies the “soft power” on which we all rely to counter surges of authoritarianism and violence in our world. When I finished reading this collection I felt a surprising combination of activism and comfort in knowing that the leaders are already among us, an effect also created recently by Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women or way back when Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper blew my teenage mind.
AB: Many of these stories feature universal experiences, especially for women. What elements make the collection distinctly Ukrainian?
GP-F: There is definitely a universal quality to Oksana’s worldview—she’s a well-read and well-traveled person, with a strong understanding of why others might look toward Ukraine and what they might expect to find there; she stands at the ready to help you understand her homeland. Her books are not written to a single readership, they invite all comers; they’re not propagandistic or patriotic, though they do value the unity of voice achieved through protest. We’ve all read about revolution; perhaps some readers have memories or sepia-toned film scenes in mind, effigies of oligarchs burning all around. But Oksana romanticizes the smallest details: in the same titular story of this collection I mentioned above, the sunshine gloves have a matching scarf, the orange hue of the Orange Revolution, candy for photojournalists seeking an image of the now. The singular version of zeal on display speaks to Ukraine’s unique position in world history. Oksana’s personification of the romantic revolutionary is an old woman making repeat trips to refill her hot thermos of tea to share with all the protesters, as in “An Album for Gustav.” These small, feminine gestures that come so naturally during the excitement of revolt are the same elements missing from the male-dominant systems of government to follow, and Oksana’s faith in them reads to me as a stunning demonstration of what it means to be the literary heroine of Ukrainian independence. (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence;” at home Oksana herself is a symbol, returning with a new novel or story to warm her people, to show them that she understands, like the woman returning yet again with more hot tea . . . )
AB: Zabuzhko’s prose sometimes verges on stream of consciousness. Having worked closely with her translators, did you encounter particular challenges when conveying it in English?
GP-F: In many ways it’s easier for me to edit a translation from a language I don’t speak than editing a book translated from French or Spanish, which I read myself, because I don’t get caught in the trap of what I might do differently as translator. Nina’s work as volume editor, which I mentioned before, gave me the leeway to focus on the rhythm in English, the reading experience coming at the text from a new perspective. The complexity of Oksana’s sentences makes translation difficult; it’s difficult to pin down the devices that work best to represent breathlessness in prose, so much of the editorial work here was focused on punctuation and syntax. But Oksana is such a generous writer—on the page and also in correspondence—her efforts to demystify her unique stream-of-consciousness style for us behind the scenes helped ensure an outcome that is both true to the original and accessible to English readers new to her work. The voice of each story stands alone but together they form a choir of protesters singing with the conviction of angels. It’s her mastery in weaving both beauty and meaning into each phrase that leaves me jaw-dropped in awe of Oksana, and excited to hear how other readers engage with this stunning new collection.
Gabriella Page-Fort is the editorial director of Amazon Crossing, where she has worked since 2010. She was named PW Star Watch Superstar in 2017 for her leadership of Amazon Crossing and passion for translation. Her list includes award-winning authors from around the world, such as Laksmi Pamuntjak, Martin Michael Driessen, Laura Esquivel, Dolores Redondo, Laura Restrepo, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, and Ayşe Kulin, as well as bestselling authors Oliver Pötzsch and Petra Durst-Benning. Her acquisitions have received accolades including the Read Russia Prize shortlist for Mariam Petrosyan’s The Gray House (translated by Yuri Machkasov) and Andrei Gelasimov’s Gods of the Steppe (translated by Marian Schwartz), and the PEN Translation Prize longlist for Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found (translated by Sora Kim-Russell). Before moving to Seattle to pursue her dream job with Amazon Crossing, Gabriella worked at Continuum International Publishing Group (now part of Bloomsbury), where she cut her teeth publishing literature in translation by working as the final editor on the hundred-volume German Library series. In her spare time, she is a literary translator from French and Spanish, a sax player, and a great admirer of the wonders of the Pacific Northwest.
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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