Posts filed under 'Ukrainian poetry'

Bilingual Books: A Personal History

June 8, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…

Writing From the Frontlines: An Interview with Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan

November 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Writing is the most significant response to war and death; writing is, in this case, life.

Yaryna Chornohuz is a combat medic in the Ukrainian Marines, currently serving on the frontlines. She also happens to be a brilliant poet, capturing the reality of the Russian invasion with powerful lyricism. I was very moved by Chornohuz’s “A Cycle of Wartime Poems” translated by Kate Tsurkan and Ostap Kin, which were featured in our Summer 2022 issue. I had the opportunity to interview Tsurkan and Kin about the importance of literature in the time of war, and we conducted our conversation over email, from our respective homes in Ukraine, the United States, and Ireland. I am proud to share this dialogue, in which we discuss—among other things—how language can be an act of resistance and how it is crucial, now more than ever, to amplify the work of Ukrainian writers and artists. 

Rose Bialer (RB): I would like to begin by asking how each of you came to translating Ukrainian literature? How did you first encounter Chornohuz’s poetry?

Kate Tsurkan (KT): Well, I am first and foremost a trained scholar of French literature, but life is truly full of surprises. By a twist of fate, I moved to Ukraine, and a year later, I met my husband and ended up staying here. What was simply a field of interest in my work as a literary magazine editor became an obligation to understand and delve deeper into the culture that I’d married into. 

As for Chornohuz, I first learned of her poetry through the journalist Justina Dobush, who read aloud the poem “too red a spot” for Asymptote. She also did an interview with Chornohuz for Apofenie, and kept telling me that this is a writer to keep my eye on. I owe a lot to Justina because when I was just starting out and admittedly knew very little, she was one of those Ukrainians giving me much-needed insight on the contemporary literary scene and Ukrainian culture in general. Chornohuz is part of the growing genre of Ukrainian veteran literature; prior to her role in the military, she was an active member of the Ukrainian literary sphere and also worked as a translator. These days, Ukrainians know her best for her military service and activism. Her poetry and overall perspective on war had such a visceral impact on me that I felt it needed to be shared with the world. 

Ostap Kin (OK): I’m originally from Ukraine, born and raised there. When I switched continents, I started translating from Ukrainian into English. It all started as a combination of factors, including challenge, curiosity, and a need to experiment; I wanted to get firsthand experience about how work that appeals to me may sound in English, and what the whole process looks like. Lastly, I did hope to share Ukrainian literary works with others.

I heard about Yaryna Chornohuz from the news sometime in 2020. As an activist, she protested, I remember, in the governmental headquarters. Kate Tsurkan is the one who introduced me to her poems and invited me to work on their English language. 

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from “Galileo” by Yevhen Pluzhnyk

February 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Oksana Rosenblum

I am quiet as grass, even quieter still

First published in 1926, today’s Translation Tuesday features an excerpt from the long poem “Galileo,” first collected in Ukrainian poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s debut collection. Oscillating between the epic ambition of its length—running to more than twenty pages in its original publication—and the persona’s declaration of his own smallness (“I am quiet as grass, even quieter still”), this poem reads like an inverse of the Whitmanian celebration of the self even as it maintains its own brand of fierce solitude. Hear translator Oksana Rosenblum contextualise this poem that was written almost a century ago now: on Pluzhnyk’s proto-Existentialist spirit and the strange parallel journey the writer took when compared to his titular figure. 

“Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s poem ‘Galileo’ was published in 1926 as part of his poetry collection Dni (Days). The debut collection of the 28-year-old Ukrainian poet made a strong impression on Ukrainian literary circles. Pluzhnyk became instantly recognized as one of the most original poets of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s–30s, for the laconism and emotional strength of his poetry. The narrator assumes the persona of a fragile, traumatized person who went through the horrors of the Civil War—hunger, everyday survival, joblessness, and more broadly, a sense of not being understood or welcomed in a society ruled by the values of the NEP (New Economic Policy) adopted by the Soviet Union in 1921. In a way, he is that person, since he witnessed all of it: the upheaval of the Revolution, the trauma of the Civil War, life-long struggle with tuberculosis, and poverty. Even though the poem was written in 1926, before the appearance of Existentialism as a philosophical movement, there is an overwhelming sense of the narrator’s involvement with the kind of questions that an existentialist writer would ask: is there any meaning to life beyond what we assign to it? Why do some people always come to the top of the hierarchy, why do others suffer unspeakable pain and hardships?

Yevhen Pluzhnyk, a poet whose life was filled with personal and social hardships and was eventually cut short by the terror and purges of the 1930s, somewhat enigmatically entitled his poem Galileo. The title remains a mystery. We know that Galileo Galilei was forced to recant his views in front of the Inquisition. Pluzhnyk never addresses this fact in his poem; moreover, he mentions Galileo only in the very last stanza. Tragically, Pluzhnyk’s fate ran in parallel to Galileo’s: in 1935, he will have to recant his own views when accused of Ukrainian nationalism and terrorism. He would die of tuberculosis on Solovetsky Islands, thousands of miles away from his beloved Ukraine.”

—Oksana Rosenblum 

Galileo

Dedicated to Marusia Yurkova

Limitless spaces, familiar orbits
Still do not exhaust Earth’s purpose.
It rains again, and I struggle with doubts;
It’s autumn. 

As I walk by coffee shops, in my worn-out boots—
By the warm lights, people and daily affairs,
Suddenly, I feel so quiet inside:
Life or death, who cares?

Oh, autumn!
       It always wears me out,
       My heart is like a small tired stone . . .
Those days, wasted in a grey typhoid barrack,
And the black spots, ravens, and I am alone.

Listen up, you, competent people!
                                              You,
Whose jaws look like big ugly claws!
I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,
I am so easily unnoticed. 

Those who have strong nerves, they
Do not need to listen to my nonsense.
But for me, someone who starves every day,
Now’s my only chance to be open. 

Maybe I am a Philistine, saddened
by the absence of a warm winter coat.
Or perhaps I come from a land,
Where people die over and over.

Can I share one thought with you?
Being honest is not easy.
Under morbid rain, every day and night
I stand on the corner and howl.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Hedgehog” by Anastasia Afanas’eva

October 8, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Alla Vilnyanskaya

About the dead, we cannot speak / for they are completed.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Anastasia Afanas’eva constructs a world of shapes, shadows, and sensations that thematize dread and longing. The poem raises up images from the page in a maelstrom—a deluge of realizations that impress themselves on the reader like a flood. But the images’ actions are unreal; they are strung together in uncanny ways. In this poem, language acts absurdly, mirroring the unmistakable confusion of loss and of reckoning. The Hedgehog and its shadow are central, and show, in verse, how the most innocuous of things can become sutured with the weight of the universe.

READ MORE…