A quote by the author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel comes to mind for those of us involved in the Ukrainian literary scene: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Nobody knows how long this war will last—only that Ukraine’s very future, and with it, Ukrainian culture, is at stake. This means that Ukrainian translators have an even more important role to play. Many of the writers that TAULT works with have enlisted in the Territorial Defense Forces. The time for literature will have to come later—but still, foreign presses and magazines are interested in publishing their words. The translator is not just a navigator of the author’s sense and meaning in this situation, but a link to that past life; a reminder that, although our world is invariably changed by the horrors that we’re living through, there are some things to strive for and look forward to.
I interviewed Zenia Tompkins by email earlier this year, and resumed our conversation following the outbreak of the Russian invasion. Most importantly, I thought it necessary to understand the layers of the Ukrainian diaspora—that is, not to speak of it in the singular—and the roles it has played in preserving and promoting Ukrainian literature abroad. I also posed several questions to Zenia about how the future of Ukrainian literature—both at home and abroad—might begin to take shape following this awful war.
—Kate Tsurkan
You were born in the United States and grew up in the Ukrainian diaspora community. What were your impressions of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture growing up?
Ukraine as an idea—as a distant, idealized, and subjugated “homeland”—was all I knew growing up. I grew up in a very insular community and never really explored beyond the confines of that community until college. I want to clarify that the part of the Ukrainian diaspora that I grew up in, the so-called “third wave” that resulted from WWII emigration, was particularly insular, so much so that we never even accepted the post-independence “fourth wave” of Ukrainian immigrants fully into our midst, nor did we have much interest in Ukrainian Americans that had immigrated prior to WWII. That third wave internally referred to themselves as “Ukes,” and I’ve recently begun to differentiate the “Ukie culture” that I was steeped in for the first eighteen years of my life from the Ukrainian American diaspora as a whole and Ukrainian culture, broadly speaking.
Ukraine was up on a pedestal in the Ukie community, but it was a distorted depiction and understanding of Ukraine that, as I would realize decades later, was steeped in WWII trauma and the realities of displaced persons camps. Ukraine was perfect; the Soviet Union was bad, and by extension all Russians were evil. Soviet Ukraine was OK, but Soviet Ukraine wasn’t actually Ukraine, only pre-Soviet Ukraine was. Ukraine needed saving (by us Ukes) so that it could be restored to its former glory, hence our job as good little Ukie children was to not forget the Ukrainian language (because it was being wiped out in Soviet Ukraine), to preserve Ukrainian culture (because it was being Russified in Soviet Ukraine), to learn Ukrainian history (because it was being lied about in Soviet Ukraine), and to at all costs marry another Uke (so that our children could continue to preserve the culture that was destined to doom at the hands of the Russians).
It all sounds a little comical and simplistic, almost farcical, when described like that, but on some level I feel like I grew up in a cult—one from which I very nearly didn’t extricate myself, and one that a lot of my friends from childhood through my twenties are still tethered to. I’ll give you one example: I remember distinctly where I was when Ukraine declared its independence in August 1991. I was fourteen years old, and I was at a Ukie dance camp in upstate New York. Class had just broken for lunch, and as the herd of little Ukie dancers was traipsing from the dance studio to the dining hall, an announcement came on over the resort’s loudspeakers that Ukraine had declared independence. The adults around us, in particular my ballet teacher, a former ballerina from Lviv, were crying tears of joy. I, in the meantime, was having a very quiet panic attack. If Ukraine was free, what did it need me for? I was a little “soldier of Ukrainian culture” whose sole purpose in life, as it had been ingrained in me since birth, was to preserve Ukrainian culture. What in the world was I supposed to do with myself now that Ukraine didn’t need us little Ukie soldiers of culture anymore? I was fourteen years old, and I was literally having a mini identity crisis because Ukraine had declared independence. My life was made purposeless in an instant.
There are a few things worth noting that explain both the idealized notions we had of Ukraine and how much we as a community clung to each other, as if both our lives and Ukraine itself depended on it: a great number of the Ukrainians that immigrated to the United States as part of the third wave did so for political reasons, because they had either been German collaborators or part of the anti-Soviet resistance, and were thus literally fleeing for their lives; the vast majority of them were from Western Ukraine, which has historically been more nationalist than other parts of Ukraine; and almost all of them passed through displaced persons camps—often spending years in them—where what would become the Ukie community was solidified.
Did these childhood impressions change in any way after your first trip to Ukraine? When did you first visit the country and what took you there?
I visited Ukraine for the first time when I was twelve, for a brief two-week visit with my dad, and was completely underwhelmed. I had grown up with storied, almost fable-like images of Ukraine in my head, and was genuinely shocked by the reality of what I saw. During that trip, I only visited Western Ukraine—Lviv, where my maternal grandparents were from, and the small town of Brody not far from Lviv, where my dad was from. My twelve-year-old brain was expecting a colorful, almost magical country, and instead I encountered gray. It felt like the whole country was gray. I think I came home from that trip with a renewed resolve of, “Oh no, we really do need to preserve this pre-Soviet Ukrainian culture because Ukraine right now is depressing!” (Forgive me, I was twelve.) I returned the following summer, alone with my sibling, for a two-month stay with distant family we had never met. I think my understanding of Ukraine grew a little more realistic and nuanced during that trip, but not by much. I vaguely recall returning to the United States feeling sorry for all Soviet Ukrainians and imbued with the conviction that the culture I was being raised in—in contrast to whatever was happening in Ukraine—was actually the “true” Ukrainian culture.
In your opinion, has the Ukrainian diaspora as a whole done enough to promote Ukrainian culture in the West? Or have they remained insular?
Yes and no. On the one hand, there have been some very notable academics who have done a tremendous amount to promote Ukrainian culture, and particularly Ukrainian literature, in the West, specifically in North America. They deserve credit for the fact that anything of Ukrainian literature made it into English and was being taught in university classrooms over the decades of Soviet rule, and since. But they were very few in number, and most of the time other members of the Ukie community appear to have had very little interest in what they were doing beyond the perfunctory, “Oh, how wonderful—You translate Ukrainian literature! What noble work . . . ” I’ve received this same reaction in recent years as I’ve started working with Ukrainian literature: all of my old Ukie acquaintances appear to have heard about the translator collective I run within months of us launching our website, and in every interaction with me they always inquire how things are going with TAULT, but not a single one of them appears to have bought, let alone read, one of the growing number of Ukrainian books recently published in English.
That aside, the post-independence fourth wave of Ukrainian Americans has taken the bull by the horns and appears hell-bent on making waves, for which they deserve genuine applause. The fourth wave of the Ukrainian diaspora emigrated primarily for educational, professional, and financial opportunities. A lot of them are very well educated and genuinely fearless in their approach to promoting Ukrainian culture in the West, particularly in the US. So while the Ukie community has continued to remain insular and to make their children muscle through Ukrainian classics with their broken Ukrainian, the members of the fourth wave that work with literature are primarily focused on contemporary literature and appear to have set the sky as the limit when it comes to promoting Ukrainian authors in the Anglophone world. This ranges from literary translators like Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky at the University of Kansas, to Oleh Kotsyuba, the publications manager at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, to Maria Genkin, a NYC-based cultural promoter, to name a few. I offer these comments with the caveat that I don’t really maintain any ties with the Ukie community at all anymore—primarily out of an aggravation that their understanding of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture feels very irrelevant and dated to me these days—and was living in Central America for the better part of the last decade, so I don’t know all that many people among the fourth-wave diaspora.
In 2019, you founded TAULT, The Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation. What motivated you to do so?
I had the brilliant idea of translating a novel about seven years ago, shortly after my husband joined the Foreign Service and I had to give up any hopes of maintaining a more conventional career around the frequent international moves. First, I spent over two years trying to figure out how to translate literature and translating my first novel, then I spent a subsequent year researching publishers and submitting the manuscript to presses. I’m pretty sure I submitted the manuscript to sixty of the eighty or so translation presses I found that had open submissions, and probably heard back from a total of five presses. That whole process was interspersed with two pregnancies and two international moves. When the author and I were finally offered contracts for the novel, I was so spent that I was genuinely having a hard time envisioning doing it all over again with another book. On top of that, it felt stupid: there came a point where I very much felt like I was wasting my own time and was growing increasingly sure that I was wasting publishers’ time. It just felt like there had to be a better, more efficient, and more enjoyable way.
I got the idea for TAULT from an interview I read with an English translator of Hungarian literature, who candidly discussed the fact that she wore two hats: on the one hand, she’s an author’s translator, but she also essentially doubles as an author’s agent in the Anglophone world because all publisher conversations go through her. It was this “duh” moment of, "Of course we’re all agents too; we just don’t think to call ourselves that." Simultaneously, I was coming across more and more articles about translator collectives, though most collectives I found appeared to involve translators working from a variety of languages into English so that their members weren’t directly competing with one another.
I’ve always been part naive and part ludicrously idealistic, so it was a very quick mental leap for me to come up with the idea of forming a collective for English translators of Ukrainian literature. Until last year, there were no proper literary agencies to speak of in Ukraine, particularly ones where someone spoke English and was equipped to deal with foreign markets. I started googling translators and building relationships with them, while simultaneously trying to catch up on thirty years’ worth of contemporary Ukrainian literature, since I had never formally studied anything related to Ukraine. We launched in early spring of 2019 with a handful of rather idealistic translators and have been essentially making things up as we go along. We take two steps forward and then realize that the vast majority of minority-language literature in English translation is published with the support of government grant programs, so we take one step back and start researching grant opportunities that Ukrainian books would be eligible for, then eventually get involved in helping the Ukrainian Book Institute establish and promote its first translation grant program. We start recruiting translators from Ukraine who have an unusually strong command of English, then realize that translators in Ukraine have been taught to translate way more creatively than is considered acceptable in the West, so we have to take a step back and start vetting for translators that don’t get too liberal in their translations. So far, it’s been three years of two steps forward, one step back. But the whole enterprise of Ukrainian literature in English translation appears to be moving forward, and I both humor and motivate myself by telling myself that TAULT has played a role in that.
In the past, Ukrainian translators were primarily members of the diaspora, but these days, many non-Ukrainians have fallen in love with the language and culture and are even translating some of the biggest names in contemporary Ukrainian literature. What do you think accounts for this shift?
The fact that Ukrainian literature is starting to attract non-native-speaking translators genuinely thrills me to pieces. We now have four translators in our collective who aren’t native or heritage speakers of Ukrainian, yourself included, and that to me is a sign that things are moving in the right direction for both Ukrainian authors and the field of Ukrainian literary translation. Translators from outside the culture bring a hugely different perspective to the work, and I very much value that perspective. As an “ex-Uke,” I have an instinct to always present Ukraine and Ukrainian authors in the best light. This past summer, I was co-translating a book with one of our translators with the beautifully non-Ukrainian name of Daisy Gibbons, and the minute I started veering in that direction, she stopped me dead in my tracks. I realized about a year into TAULT that what Ukrainian literature was in need of was a “translation infrastructure”—namely, a cadre of professional literary translators who translate as their primary pursuit and who can afford to do so because the work is plentiful and well-paying enough, and there are foreign rights managers at individual Ukrainian presses who can assist with promoting Ukrainian books abroad, Ukraine-specific grants that presses and translators can apply for, and the like. In short, what’s needed is a “system” where authors know who to turn to, what the process looks like, how long it takes, and what their odds of getting published in English are. To me, and again I caveat this by clarifying that I have no formal training in either translation or agenting, having translators with first names like Ali and Daisy and Kate and Sandra is a huge and necessary part of that eventual infrastructure.
You work with both groups of translators. Would you say they approach texts differently?
I don’t know if I would say that they approach texts all that differently when they translate, from what I’ve seen, but I do think they approach books differently in that they’re drawn to different books. One of the translators we work with is a heritage speaker like me, and, like mine, his family emigrated to the West after WWII. When we first met, all of the books he kept mentioning being interested in translating felt very “Ukie” to me: they all seemed to tap in to those idealized notions of a glorious Ukrainian past when Cossacks ran around in their billowy balloon pants fighting Turks and Tatars. A lot of the authors he’s translated are ones whose books made it out of Soviet Ukraine during the 1950s–1980s and that he grew up reading, so it’s understandable that those are the ones that resonate most for him. But we’re playing a catch-up game with him to acclimate him to post-independence Ukrainian literature. By contrast, most of the translators in our collective who learned Ukrainian as adults are interested first and foremost in very contemporary literature, the books that are being written today and tomorrow. The same appears to hold true of translators who have more recently emigrated to the United States. But as a collective, I’m pushing our translators to co-translate more, and, at least from my perspective, it’s turning out to be a wonderful experience. Some of us have such wildly different life backgrounds that we can’t help but make a translation stronger, more nuanced, and more insightful by joining forces.
How receptive have foreign publishers been to Ukrainian literature so far? Would you say the foundation for the market has been established, or do Ukrainian translators and authors still have a long way to go?
The last three years have definitely been a slow process, but I place a lot of that blame on myself in that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what I was getting into when I started planning TAULT four years ago. One of the obvious huge problems for Ukrainian literature was that even if foreign publishers were interested in exploring Ukrainian literature, they had no idea how to go about doing so. They were essentially forced to sit back and hope that some translator, most often with a full-time job in academia, would submit something to them for consideration. Ukrainian presses didn’t—and still, unfortunately, for the most part don’t—have foreign rights departments. The Ukrainian Book Institute, a relatively new entity under Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture tasked with promoting Ukrainian literature abroad, didn’t exist, and as such there were no English-language catalogs of Ukrainian literature available. As I mentioned before, there were also no grant programs available to support the translation and publication of Ukrainian books abroad. A lot of that has changed in the last few years, but it feels like the luck of timing in many respects. Just as I was planning TAULT, the Ukrainian Book Institute was being formed, a handful of emerging translators not of Ukrainian descent and without full-time jobs in academia were appearing on the scene, the first Ukraine-specific grant programs were being planned, etc.
In the context of all of the above, foreign publishers have been relatively lukewarm toward Ukrainian literature over the last few years, but that interest has grown exponentially over the last year. I attribute that rise in interest to both Russia’s increasingly menacing stance toward Ukraine prior to the invasion in February and the factors I noted earlier. All of this has given Ukrainian presses the impetus to become bolder in wanting to access foreign markets and more forward-thinking in how they do so. Until about a year ago, TAULT’s translators had spent the bulk of their time translating commissioned samples for publishers and authors in Ukraine to help them access various foreign markets. Over the last year, we’ve found ourselves having to turn down requests for samples more and more because our translators simply can’t keep up with the book project requests coming in from American, British, and European presses. Of the six translators in our collective that translate more or less full-time, each of us had our next three book projects planned out months ago already, all of which are scheduled for publication.
Looking at it from the translator’s perspective, yes, the foundation of the market has undoubtedly been established, but what’s deceptive is that until the invasion in late February, this demand all came from a handful of very committed presses: Deep Vellum Publishing, The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI Books), ibidem Press (Ukrainian Voices Series), and Lost Horse Press (Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series) deserve particular commendation here. There are still a lot of literary translation presses that, to my knowledge, haven’t actively explored Ukrainian literature, and, until a few weeks ago, we weren’t quite there yet in terms of getting our authors noticed by the so-called Big Five US publishers. That said, don’t ask me how many emails have been languishing in my inbox not responded to since before the invasion.
There’s obviously been an uptick in interest from presses over the last month and a half, but a lot of this interest is a little all over the place. I’m hearing rumors of large American presses offering contracts for books I’ve never heard of by authors whose names I don’t even recognize, and I can’t help but groan a little at the phenomenon of large presses grabbing at whatever Ukrainian book they happen to stumble across first. I’ve heard from a growing number of literary agents interested in representing and promoting Ukrainian authors, which has been fantastic and is very much what Ukrainian literature needs right now. But those conversations move slowly out of necessity because the agents don’t read in Ukrainian themselves and are reliant on us for samples and other submissions materials. And a growing number of mid-sized presses who don’t need financial assistance to publish a translation have been actively scouting Ukrainian literature through us. I do think that Ukrainian authors and translators have hit a point where we can just slowly and quietly keep doing what we’re doing, trusting that the market interest will continue to grow.
What kind of Ukrainian authors have been resonating the most with foreign audiences thus far?
It’s hard to say, mostly because the situation has changed so much over the last year. We have a lot of books that are currently being translated and are scheduled for publication over the next one to three years, so I’m comfortable commenting on which books are resonating with publishers more than I am commenting on which books are resonating with readers. For better or worse, I’m so in the weeds of translation and publishing logistics that I can’t tell you the last time I read a review of a Ukrainian book in translation. The books that are getting snatched up quickly are falling into two categories right now: literary reportage about contemporary Ukraine, preferably with a political bent, and what I’ve jokingly started calling “haute fiction,” i.e., award-winning, very literary and very contemporary fiction (as one publisher said to me last year, “I want the most literary fiction—like, as literary as it gets.”) Those are the types of requests we’re routinely getting, and those are the books that are being acquired quickly and are finding translators quickly.
Some of these names won’t be familiar to English readers because the books are still being translated or are still under submission, but on the nonfiction end that includes authors like Oleg Sentsov, Stanislav Aseyev, Nataliya Gumeniuk, and Oleksandr Mykhed, and on the literary fiction end, some of the authors that are garnering the most interest include Tanja Maljartschuk, Sophia Andrukhovych, Myroslav Laiuk, and Petro Yatsenko. What’s notable is how young a lot of these authors are: of the ones I just named, almost all of them are in their thirties. The demand right now, which is obviously understandable in light of the current political situation, is for authors who grew up in the post-Soviet era and are exploring Ukrainian history, culture, and identity through a critical lens. Soon after I launched TAULT, I caught myself routinely asking authors how comfortably they read in English and doing so very early in our conversations. On some level, I’ve instinctively been seeking out those authors who read a lot of literature from around the world and are ready, whether consciously or subconsciously, to write about Ukraine to a world audience, not just a domestic one.
Since the invasion, the scope of what English-language presses are interested in has definitely broadened. We’re getting our first serious interest in Ukrainian mainstream and genre literature, as well as stronger interest in things like history books. There’s also been an unexpected amount of interest in middle-grade literature, both fiction and nonfiction, which has historically been a segment of the English market that Ukrainian publishers and authors haven’t been able to break into. What has been frustrating is that publishers are asking for the newest books possible, not realizing that there are incredibly strong Ukrainian books from a few years ago that still haven’t been published in English. I can’t seem to explain to publishers that they don’t need to compete for the newest book because virtually no one was competing for Ukrainian books a few months ago, so there’s plenty of wonderful Ukrainian literature to go around.
How would you describe the contemporary Ukrainian literature scene for outsiders? Is there anything about it that makes it unique?
I need to preface my response here by stressing again that I have no formal training in anything related to Ukraine or Ukrainian literature: my degrees are in comparative religions, Islamic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, and until I started dabbling in Ukrainian literature, I’m pretty sure Farsi was my strongest foreign language. There is still a lot I don’t know or understand about the contemporary Ukrainian literature scene, never mind the huge gaps in my knowledge of Ukrainian literature, and there are plenty of people in academia who are much better equipped to comment on this. The one thing I will say is that the literary scene in Ukraine feels very raw to me right now, in a good way. It seems like authors are getting bolder and bolder with narrative structure, style, book length, peeling back layers of Soviet propaganda to re-explore things for themselves, etc. If I had to choose one word to describe it, it would probably be just that: raw. But it almost feels like a tug-of-war that’s being played out both within the scene and internally by authors themselves.
Part of that rawness also seems to be tied to a certain confusion that authors are struggling with themselves: there’s a certain leap that needs to happen, in my opinion, from writing a book that’s aimed at appealing to people of your shared culture to writing one that has a sort of universal resonance that any reader the world over could enjoy and appreciate. But there’s a possible trade-off there—one that I think a lot of younger authors in Ukraine are becoming aware of—in that you might have to sacrifice a little on being a best-selling author at home to stand a chance of being noticed internationally. That whole dynamic that we were all watching playing out in the news over recent years of does Ukraine want to be democratic, how badly does it want to be democratic, what is it willing to sacrifice and what changes is it willing to make to become fully democratic—all those growing pains, for lack of a better expression, have trickled into its literature. Reading contemporary Ukrainian literature is like watching the experiment of democracy playing out under a microscope, and part of moving forward toward democracy necessarily involves a re-exploration of the past, often the most unsavory parts of the past.
What is the biggest challenge facing Ukrainian translators, authors, and publishers in the coming years?
Patience, patience, patience. I won’t apply this comment to Ukrainian translators, since most of us are essentially on the outside of Ukrainian culture, even if we’re Ukrainian or of Ukrainian descent, but one of the biggest challenges for me in my work with TAULT over the last few years has been acclimating to what seems to be a Ukrainian culture of “stall, stall, stall—oh, wait, we need to scramble, scramble, scramble!” I keep trying to explain to everyone we work with in Ukraine that us Westerners aren’t huge fans of scrambling. In Ukraine, a five-hundred-page novel can find itself being chopped up between two translators, who knock it out in three months. An editor then quickly lumps the thing together, and two or three months later, you have a printed book sitting on your table. Trying to explain to Ukrainian authors that an English translator would require at least a year to translate a book of that length, and that year will be followed by months of editing and production, after which the book will be submitted to a distribution service that requires the manuscript twelve to eighteen months in advance of the publication date is quite the miserable experience. You see the confusion turning to despondency turning to despair in their eyes as you lay out that timeline. Easily half of my conversations with authors these days revolve around me reassuring them that the best thing they can do is to just sit tight and focus on writing their next book. If Ukrainian authors and publishers can acclimate to the idea of not rushing the process, I fully believe that the direction things are moving in has picked up enough momentum that now it’s just a matter of keeping the ball rolling in the right direction.
In mid-February, I would never have imagined saying this to American, British, and Canadian publishers as well, but after the last month and a half, I have a similar plea of patience for them as well. Offering a contract for the first best Ukrainian book you come across isn’t going to help Ukrainian authors and publishers if that book never actually makes it into print. I keep finding myself urging acquiring presses to slow down and ensure that we have a translator lined up for a project before offering a rights contract, so that a project doesn’t sit on a shelf for a year or two or, worse yet, get tasked to a Russian-speaking translator with no knowledge of Ukraine. I also keep finding myself encouraging acquiring presses to be more thoughtful in their acquisitions, to ensure that they have a good sense of the book they’re acquiring and are confident it’ll both fit their publishing program and won’t disappoint them once fully translated.
Does the Russian invasion of Ukraine change the role of the Ukrainian translator in any way, in the sense that they are the ambassadors for Ukrainian authors?
Again, I’m going to respond yes and no. I think that most translators working from a minority language instinctively view themselves as ambassadors of that particular culture and the authors they translate. From my perspective, the only thing that has really changed since the Russian invasion is that translators of Ukrainian literature can no longer afford to be passive ambassadors of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian authors. There’s an expectation—both from authors and from other translators in the field—that those of us who translate Ukrainian literature are and will continue to be outspoken in our condemnation of the invasion. Most of us aren’t doing any more or any less to promote and advocate for Ukrainian authors than we have done in the past, but the few instances where Ukrainian translators have chosen not to serve as ambassadors for the authors whose work they translate have become glaring examples of what some of us consider inappropriate passivity. If an author you’ve translated multiple novels of has chosen to stay in a city like Kharkiv, which has been under steady bombardment by Russian forces in recent weeks, in order to help with resistance and humanitarian relief, and you as that author’s translator haven’t openly and actively condemned the invasion, you’ve either wittingly or unwittingly made yourself a pariah in the Ukrainian literary scene. In the field of Ukrainian literature, there’s no room or patience right now for passivity and silence. The authors we translate, many of whom are risking their lives on a daily basis, need and deserve better: they need and deserve translators who openly and loudly condemn Putin, the Russian army, and the imperialistic undercurrent of Russian culture that has enabled and justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For those translators who translate both Ukrainian and Russian authors, I genuinely don’t see or understand how continuing to do so is possible right now. As a translator, you simply have to choose a side and, as I said before, do so loudly.
Some of your authors are fighting in the war. What has that been like for you to watch from the United States?
This is the one aspect of my work that has been hardest for me. I’m in constant contact with a lot of the authors our collective works with, and I’m having routine conversations with them over Instant Messenger about how they’re doing, how their spouses are doing, how their children are doing. I’ve never been one to translate at arm’s length; I’ve always preferred getting to know the authors whose work I translate rather well, if not intimately. When an author you know well texts you a picture of his kids in a refugee camp, or writes a Facebook post about one of his former classmates getting killed by the Russian army, it’s obviously hard to feel like translating is the best thing you can be doing with your time. But as a translator, I have a specific skill set and a specific knowledge that equips me to do more than go out and wave a flag around at a protest, and that skill set and knowledge, for me, come with an obligation to stay put at home and do what I do best. But the Ukrainian authors and publishers that TAULT works with are a huge part of my life, both personally and professionally, and that’s obviously not something that I can or want to shut off. I’m still in the process of learning to have less-than-productive days when I’m not able to get much done beyond thinking about that author who enlisted or that other author whose children and wife had to flee Ukraine. On those days, emails from American publishers can wait.
TAULT was recently written about in The New York Times. In what way has that changed your translation work? Do you think the attention will last?
It honestly hasn’t. I haven’t received any more or any fewer emails from publishers since the article was published. Everyone keeps asking me this, and it’s almost bizarre that it’s made no difference in either my workload or the content of my work. The one exception was the Grammy Awards, whose producers likely found me through that article. I was approached in late March by the Grammys to help plan a Ukraine tribute at the awards on April 3. At my encouragement and through my facilitation, the Ukrainian author Lyuba Yakimchuk read an excerpt of one of her poems from the collection Apricots of Donbas (Lost Horse Press, 2021) during a new John Legend song inspired by Ukraine at the awards ceremony. That said, my inbox was pretty crazy before the publication of that article already, as were the inboxes of a number of our translators, yourself included.
Nobody knows when Russia will be defeated, only that more suffering will ensue until then. Where does Ukrainian literature go from here?
I honestly don’t know. Many Ukrainian authors are obviously not in a position to write right now because the circumstances of their personal lives are so uncertain as a result of the invasion, though there does seem to be an increase in the amount of poetry being written in Ukrainian in recent weeks. When Ukrainian prose authors are finally able to find the time and circumstances to write, what they’ll have to say about all of this will likely greatly depend on how this invasion continues to play out. If I were a writer, I can’t imagine what I would write right now. All I seem to hear in my own head lately is a deafening silence, one stemming from shock and grief. Very often these days, words simply fail me.
