From the Translator

Katherine E. Young

Lyudmyla Khersonska’s poems in Words for War concern themselves with the fundamental loneliness of the individual in war. They contain recurring images of individuals in hiding, often curled in the fetal position, deliberately choosing to turn their backs towards war. Sometimes the individuals are reduced to body parts that must then be patched back together by seamstresses. In this poetic universe, war attracts and inflames idiots, both the ones at home and the ones across the Russian border. The emotional landscape of many of the poems is post-apocalyptic, not surprising when the “enemy” is someone with whom one has longstanding emotional and cultural ties. In “When a country of — overall — nice people,” Khersonska’s narrator describes watching the people next door turn slowly fascist and considers what it means to then meet those people in the street. Sometimes the enemy turns out to be a member of one’s own family: to the narrator of “You really don’t remember Grandpa – but let’s say you do,” Russia appears as the fearsome family patriarch who unbuckles his artificial leg at night, leaving it to keep a jealous watch over the family’s rooms.

All these poems ask to what degree an individual has a choice when war explodes outside the window, rattling the glass. It’s a world of lost opportunities and blasted hopes: in “I planted a camellia in the yard,” Khersonska’s speaker says simply, “I wanted to be a lady, not a war-ravaged rag.” In “The whole soldier doesn’t suffer,” Khersonska uses black humor to depict the psychology of soldiering as an exercise in denial: regardless of weather, enemy fire, bumbling by the higher ups (including God), the soldier keeps going as in the old Soviet song “Крылатые качели,” repeating the mantra that happiness lies just around the bend. These poems remind us that sometimes victory is just making it out alive.