Posts filed under 'invasion'

We Stand With Ukraine: “Mother Says” by Andrii Krasnyashchikh

April 23, 2022 | in We Stand With Ukraine | by Andrii Krasnyashchikh and Matthew Hyde

Every morning in the faculty chatroom they do a headcount: ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’.

This piece, a war diary by Kharkiv native Andrii Krasnyashchikh translated from the Russian by Matthew Hyde, marks the conclusion of Asymptote‘s We Stand With Ukraine Series. Over the course of the series’s run, we have brought together translations and original English-language compositions from around the world. Collectively, these pieces report on the war from the ground and examine the voyeuristic feeling of following it from afar; they comment on the latest developments and put them in dialogue with other conflicts from history. Above all else, they are an expression of solidarity with the victims of this war and a call for an end to the violence.

Mother Says

Translator’s note: Andrii Krasnyashchikh writes from his hometown of Kharkiv, a town of literary renown, as Russian bombs fall. The added tragedy of the situation is that history is repeating itself, in a distorted form. Much of Kharkiv was reduced to rubble in World War II; now Andrii’s mother says: ‘they’re worse than the fascists.’ The other bitter irony is that Andrii is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, a representative of the ‘Russian World’, whom Russia has supposedly come to liberate. In his sparse, tense style, Andrii documents the reality of life in a town under bombardment, everyday mundanities offset against the ever-present, terrifying backdrop of war. But hope is not yet lost, and humour is one of the coping mechanisms; Andrii’s daughter finds an anecdote on the internet in which Putin returns to earth from hell, only to find that wherever he goes he is charged in the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia; the whole world is Ukrainian now.

—Matthew Hyde

Kharkiv, March 2022.

Mother says: they’re worse than the fascists.

She was born in 1946, she doesn’t remember the war. My father remembers, he was born in 1940. He talks about the missile which hit their house, how he and his brother fled through a field, how a bomb fell right next to them. He remembers plenty from the war.

Mother talks about her granddaughter, about when she was little, how she’d say ‘tyup’ instead of ‘soup’. Her granddaughter’s not so little now—ten years old already, she’s sure to remember this war.

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022 | in Book Club | by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

Translation Tuesday: An Extract from “To The Border” by Ondřej Štindl

August 21, 2018 | in Translations | by Julia Sherwood and Tereza and Mike Baugh

Remembering the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, exactly 50 years ago to this date

50 years ago on 21 August 1968, the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries marched into Czechoslovakia, crushing the short-lived experiment with democratic socialism known as the Prague Spring. This brutal clampdown marked the beginning of “normalization”: within months of the invasion, before the borders were sealed, thousands of people fled the country. Tens of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks who refused to pledge allegiance to the new regime and declare their support for the Soviet-led “fraternal assistance” lost their jobs. Free expression was stifled, scores of writers, film and theatre directors, artists, musicians and other artists were banned from publishing or performing. Some, like Milan Kundera or Miloš Forman, were driven into exile, while of those who stayed, dozens were imprisoned, and their children punished for their parents’ “sins.” (My own parents were among those silenced and later jailed, while I was barred from access to higher education). Playwright Václav Havel, who would spend years in prison for his outspoken opposition to the new regime before becoming the country’s first post-communist President following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, articulated the devastating impact of normalization on the people of Czechoslovakia in an open letter addressed to Communist Party Secretary-General Gustáv Husák in 1975:

“Despair leads to apathy, apathy to conformity, conformity to routine performance—which is then cited as evidence of ‘mass political involvement’. All this goes to make up the contemporary concept of ‘normal’ behaviour—a concept which is, in essence, deeply pessimistic… Order has been established. At the price of a paralysis of the spirit, a deadening of the heart and devastation of life. Surface ‘consolidation’ has been achieved. At the price of a spiritual and moral crisis in society?”

Lest we forget the hard-fought lessons of history that still hold great relevance today, let’s remind ourselves of them again and again through great works of literature, such as this vivid description of a political awakening in the aftermath of this invasion, in Ondřej Štindl’s novel translated for the first time into English by Tereza and Mike Baugh for Asymptote.

—Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia