From the Translator

Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore College

I do not know Ukrainian, though I have sung Ukrainian songs, and once I tried to learn some of the language, working with a Ukrainian student who was taking a class with me. (Christina, if you pick up this anthology and find this essay, let me say that I still appreciate your patience!) The little bit of rudimentary Czech left from grad school, it turned out, interfered terribly with my pronunciation, and my children were small and time-consuming then, and the attempt soon came to an end. Many years later—a few years ago—I realized I would never be properly able to read the Ukrainian books I had on my shelf, so I posted an ad for free books on SEELANGS (the e-mail list for people who work with Slavic languages). I was delighted that several people quickly wrote back to ask me for the books—Soviet editions of Olha Kobylianska, Lesya Ukrainka, and Marko Vovchok.

Because of this (non) background, I was very happy indeed to work with this anthology project. When the invitation came, I knew just who would make the best co-translator: Mary Kalyna, an activist, singer, researcher and community organizer, who was sent to her first day of kindergarten knowing only Ukrainian but by now is a completely native speaker of English as well. I made the first versions of all the poems, relying on a dictionary and on my knowledge of Russian and Croatian; Russian has a more similar grammar (and uses a more similar alphabet), but Croatian has a different shared vocabulary with Ukrainian. Maryka went over my drafts to fix mistakes, and at that point she decided to consult with our third co-translator, Bohdan Pechenyak, who had (relatively) recently arrived in the US from Ukraine. We were glad to get thoughtful corrections and suggestions on our drafts from Max, Oksana and Kevin. I always tell my students who are studying translation to show their drafts to anyone whose taste they trust, even if that person doesn’t know the original language, because the “inexperienced” readers may have great suggestions or point out that something is unclear or ineffective. What a pleasure to get feedback from people who really know the tradition and background of the poems, as well as the original language.

The poems we worked on, like the whole collection, are quite varied. Halyna Kruk’s have an informal, contemporary style, full of the rhythm of living speech. A woman expresses women’s experiences of war: we hear not only a mother’s prayers and terrible anxiety for her son in “someone stands between you and death.” The mother compares him to an unripe strawberry, underlining his connection (and hers) with the earth and the family farm or garden. But at the same time she is picking the strawberries: harvest, or death, should be natural parts of the cycle of human experience. She, unlike death at the front, knows to pick only ripe strawberries and to leave the green ones until they have matured. (No farmer ever loves war: it tramples the fields and ruins the harvest, takes the men and horses away from the fields where they are needed, and breaks the hearts of the mothers.) “A Woman Named Hope” offers an even more complicated view of women’s experience of war, hinting broadly at sexual violence and at the way standards of behavior (as well as mechanisms of twisted pleasure) change in extraordinary circumstances. “Victory is a whore, she belongs to anyone,” says the woman named Hope (Надія in Ukrainian, a more frequent female name than Hope in English, though I have known a woman named Hope, and a woman named Faith too). Just as loss and violence may come to anyone in a war zone, regardless of how she lived her life before, so too victory may follow the biggest tanks and guns rather than rewarding any kind of moral judgment.

Marjana Savka’s “We wrote poems” examines the links between life and literature, recalling the days when war was a historical topic, “on palimpsests of old posters,” much less intimate and vital than the experience of love. Readings of an older text change later, taking on an air of prophecy or perhaps of naïve and carefree youth in the days long before misfortune. The poem “Forgive me, darling, I’m not a fighter” returns to imagery of tending plants and of harvest, so resonant for Ukraine with its rich and fertile soil and its farming traditions. Here it is a man who speaks—a good and gentle man who knows the ways of the orchard, and who uses his knife to prune branches. He can weave his lover a basket of willow twigs, but he cannot turn his tools to violence. Does the poem reproach him for his limited vision, or does it mourn for a man whose kindness and focus on his own locally rooted life leave his lover at the mercy of events outside? Perhaps it does both. “January pulled him apart” (which features a lot of untranslatable wordplay in its original Ukrainian) once again puts a dead soldier (or civilian, in this case?) in the grass, emphasizing his bond with the earth.

Maryka and I, who have scholarly interests as well as political commitments to women’s experience and narratives, feel the importance of translating women. How often is war considered a man’s thing, sidelining women’s perspectives, whether they be suffering or judgment? And how often have collections of poetry chosen male writers over the others, even if that distorts the image of the literary ecosystem in the language concerned? This collection on the other hand includes voices from all over Ukrainian poetry, a very good thing.

The importance of translating poetry from Ukraine at this moment is obvious. These translations get the news out, transforming facts and discourses with artistic treatment, but they also show the role of a poetic response to current events when the situation becomes grave. We are delighted to participate in making these works available to Anglophone readers.