Posts featuring Yevhen Pluzhnyk

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.

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…