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Stars Amid Rubble

Ukrainian Poetry in English: A Portfolio from Sibelan Forrester followed by her notes

The Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College, Sibelan Forrester specializes in twentieth-century Russian poetry and Russian women writers. An award-winning translator, Professor Forrester has published translations from Serbian, Croatian, Russian, and Ukrainian. She selects some poems to share with Fence’s readers and talks a bit about her experience with learning Slavic Languages and translation in the context of wars. She sent Fence some translations from Ukrainian and some notes on the works and translations.

The Portfolio:

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Halyna Kruk

someone stands between you and death. . .
someone stands between you and death—but
who knows how much more my heart can stand—
where you are, it’s so important
someone prays for you
even with their own words
even if they don’t clasp their hands and kneel
plucking the stems off strawberries from the garden
I recall how I scolded you when you were small
for squashing the berries before they ripened
my heart whispers: Death, he hasn’t ripened yet
he’s still green, nothing in his life has been
sweeter than unwashed strawberries
I beg you: oh God, don’t place him at the front,
please don’t rain rockets down on him, oh God
I don’t even know what a rocket looks like,
my son, I can’t picture the war even to myself

April 2015

Halyna Kruk, trans Sibelan Forrester

хтось стоїть між тобою і смертю. . .

хтось стоїть між тобою і смертю, але, хтозна,
наскільки ще її стане - серце
опиняєшся в місці і часі, де так важливо
щоб хтось за тебе молився
хоча б подумки, хоча б своїми словами
хоча б не складаючи руки в молитві
відриваючи хвостики полуниці, тільки-но з грядки,
згадуючи, як сварила тебе малого,
що товчешся по ягодах, не даєш їм дозріти

шепоче: смерте, він ще не дозрів, він такий ще зелений,
у його житті не було ще нічого
солодшого за ту нехитру немиту полуницю
благає: не клади його, Боже, скраю,
не сип його градом, Боже,
я ж навіть не знаю, як той град виглядає, сину,
я ж навіть не можу собі тої війни уявити!..

червень 2015

Published in Words for War, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochynsky (Academic Studies Press, 2017), available in Open Access at Words for War

Pan-Pan Gou, a graduate student in Sound Design, set this translation (with bits of the original Ukrainian) to music in this lovely version, called “Protest Song.”

Although the synthesized voices can only sing “Ah,” if you follow along you can see and hear that the setting mixes the English and Ukrainian beautifully.

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Oksana Lutsyshyna

Poet and scholar Oksana Lutsyshyna reads Who is on my side (in the translation by Olena Jennings)

Who Is on My Side

who is on my side, you ask
who is on my side? – this tree here,
as if it could be against you?
as if trees could be against people?
a whole park of trees
a whole forest, you could say – and are all on your side
all of them
and the cat? is the cat against you?
no, the cat is on your side
this cat and all in the world’s cats
all – on your side, all – your army
nimble, yellow-eyed
and gods? yours and others – and everyone in the world?
wouldn’t they help you?
of course, they would
they are on your side
how could they be – against you?
and that teacher that said – thoughts are everything?
what’s his name – Swami Vishnudevananda
is he – against you?
why waste his time! of course,
he is on your side
on your side
and the sea? what – you think, the sea is against you?
all its waves and pebbles and beaches
visible and invisible
everything is for you, don’t doubt it
everyday and every minute
do you hear – the sea roars?
it says to you: I
am on your side
on your side
and music? which of the notes is against you?
which of the melodies?
Mozart? rappers? pianists?
The Accademia Bizantina? Paul McCartney?
no, what are you thinking
everyone is on your side
on your side
and there is no one against you
and there will never be
and so love, keep on loving
don’t be afraid

Translated by Olena Jennings

© Oksana Lutsyshyna

Оксана Луцишина

Хто за мене

хто за мене, питаєш
хто за мене? - ось це дерево,
хіба воно може бути проти тебе?
хіба дерева бувають проти людей?

цілий парк дерев
цілий ліс, якщо хочеш - і всі за тебе
кожнісіньке

а кіт? хіба кіт проти тебе?
ні, кіт за тебе
і цей кіт і всі на світі коти
всі - за тебе, всі - твоя армія
стрункі, жовтоокі

а боги? твої і чужі - і всі на світі?
хіба їм для тебе щось шкода?
та нічого не шкода, звісно,
вони за тебе,
як би це вони були - проти?

а той учитель що сказав - думка може все?
як його - зараз згадаю - Свамі Вішнудевананда?
він що - проти тебе?
ото став би він витрачати час! звісно,
він за тебе
за тебе

а море? що - думаєш, море проти тебе?
всі його хвилі і камінці і піщинки
видимі і невидимі
всі за тебе, не сумнівайся
щодня і щохвилини
чуєш - море шумить?
це воно каже тобі: я
за тебе
за тебе

а музика? котра з нот - проти тебе?
котра із мелодій?
Моцарт? репери? піаністи?
Академія Бізантіна? Пол Маккартні?
та ні, ну що ти
всі за тебе
за тебе

і немає нікого проти
і ніколи не буде

а тому люби, люби далі

не бійся

© Oksana Lutsyshyna

A bit of this poem also closes Oksana Lutsyshyna’s moving article about the late Victoria Amelina (1986-2023) from the Kyiv Independent (July 12, 2023)

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Serhiy Zhadan

CONTRABAND

In a broken seat, ripped out of a truck,
looking at clouds overhead
since early morning
sits the young god of European contraband,
wrapped in a down jacket,
listening to a Gypsy melody play on a stolen cell phone.
My countrymen, winter has come to our land
and oil shines in cellars, fish fall asleep in reservoirs,
churches and train stations are heated only by long conversations—
there is always more warmth in winter voices than sense.
Tear the tanned leather of shearlings and bomber jackets;
as long as we know every saint
on our border by name,
countrymen, our sons can’t be hurt by knives of bullets
or carried off by the current or blown away by the north wind.
Snow in the mountain pass,
the bitches at customs
will take your weapons,
will take your drugs.
You will stand like a ghost in the fog, gold scattered about—
Where now, Lord, where are your Carpathians?
Who should I spend the night with in these fields without snow?
How can I cross to the other side; how can I stand
the fury which fills me since you abandoned me?—
Lord, pull me out from this shit,
if you can see me in this fog.
Wandering sun, roll through our quiet days,
come, my joy, warm yourself with fire and wine.
While you suffer winter is passing,
there’s only our heat—nothing else
between you and me—only a river
filled with fish and water.

“Contraband.” From What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps; foreword by Bob Holman. Published by Yale University Press in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, 2019. Reproduced by permission.

“The dark shattered wicked winter”

The dark shattered wicked winter
silence waits at the door like death.
What will remain of this winter
will be the words and how you said them.
All our troubles will be blamed on them.
They will be quoted and picked apart.
But I will just love them
and remember them.
I will remember the sky and how high it seemed.
I will remember cities suddenly startled by screams.
History becomes simple and clear
when I decide to fill it with laughter.
Remember the snow on your lashes,
remember the sun, searing, like a burn.
Children born after these snowstorms
will recognize this land by touch.
They will recognize its water by taste,
they will recognize the color of its wheat,
they will love its dry spells and storms,
they will even love its hospitals and prisons.
I will remember the chill under our nails,
the fire that dried out our throats,
your last moves in the middle of the night—
light hesitant, final.
Children born under those stars
and named after the dead,
will exude wisdom in each breath,
while talking to enemies and thieves.
They will be stubborn and sure of themselves,
as if their future held no death,
as if their past held no rage.
They will remember everything that’s been forgotten.
They will make their way in night storms,
overcoming hurdles and obstacles.
They can handle it, try and teach them
to believe, to love and to remember.
Remember all that they carry with them:
the grass blackened by snow,
the sky over scorched heads,
the earth under tired feet.

“The dark shattered wicked winter.” From What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps; foreword by Bob Holman. Published by Yale University Press in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, 2019. Reproduced by permission.

You can order a copy here

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Zhadan and the Dogs

Zhadan has written well-regarded novels in addition to his poetry. At least seven books of his prose have been translated into English. He is also the lead singer of a ska band called “Zhadan and the Dogs” (Жадан і собаки)—they were formerly called “Dogs in Space,” a name redolent of the first Sputnik years, but Zhadan got so famous that it made sense to capitalize on his name. Жадан і Собаки – Діти

As soon as you know that the animated buses are labeled “Children,” the anger in the cartoon bombs and flames is clear. You can hear the rhyming and soundplay even if you don’t know the language: in a song rhyme, and of course rhythm, are foregrounded and satisfying.

Here’s another – more fun: Viski (Whiskey)

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Sibelan’s reflections

Geopolitics directly impact which Languages may be learned in a given time and place.

Russian and Ukrainian (like Belarusian) are East Slavic languages, closer to each other linguistically than they are to the West and South Slavic languages. When Muscovy began to grow and add to its territory, its educated bureaucrats perceived Ukrainian as Russian that had been “spoiled” by contact with Polish. Imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union repeatedly banned use of Ukrainian, especially in publishing, as various territories were taken over. Most people in Ukraine, especially peasants, continued speaking and writing in Ukrainian, though there were plenty of speakers of other languages there, especially Yiddish.

Part of what happens in an empire is that a region is broken into pieces that carry different names, and regional identity is invisible. The US always thought of the USSR with all its Soviet Socialist Republics as Russia. Before the Revolution and after as well, Russian was the power language, and for most of the Soviet period the “regional” languages were suppressed or not taught; in the Ukrainian SSR, teachers of Russian were paid more than teachers of Ukrainian. Not teaching Ukrainian language in institutions of higher education in the US was a byproduct of this attitude; when I was in graduate school in the perestroika years Harvard was almost the only place where it was offered. (Canada did better!) The fact that Ukrainian poetry persisted is amazing. After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 more universities began offering Ukrainian, and there was more attention to Ukrainian writers, who were previously considered an émigré concern that would not interest a contemporary reader. The newly independent country of Ukraine had a population of 50 million, which is enough to grab the attention of academic departments as well as political actors.

War and politics influence the literature of a people

Until the nineteenth century, most people everywhere were illiterate, and so in Ukraine too. The verbal arts were carried on by wandering bards and local folk singers; an educated person in Ukraine who stood out might be appropriated by the Russian state (see: Feofan Prokopovich). As in many other places, poetry became a form that demonstrated the artistic achievement of the nation and the talent of the language’s speakers.

Hryhory Skovoroda (1722-1794)

An important philosopher and composer as well as poet, Skovoroda also taught poetics in Pereiaslav and in Kharkiv. He wrote in Church Slavonic, Ukrainian and Russian. The Garden of Divine Songs and Collected Poetry of Hryhory Skovoroda (2016) was translated into English by Michael Naydan.

Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko, the most famous Ukrainian poet, was born into serfdom in Moryntsi, a village in central Ukraine, in 1814. He was taken to St Petersburg because of his talent as a painter. Eventually his friends pooled their money and bought his freedom—but in 1847 he was arrested for membership in the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and for writing poems in the Ukrainian language about the oppression of Ukraine. After many migrations, he died in 1861, worn out by difficult life in exile.

Panteleimon Kulish (1819-1897)

Besides poetry, Kulish wrote criticism, collected folklore, and translated literature (and the Bible) into Ukrainian. His suggested spelling reforms were the basis of Modern Ukrainian orthography. His best-known works are historical novels.

Marko Vovchok (1833-1907)

Pen name of Maria Vilinskaya; in her first marriage Markovych. She was born in Russia but grew up in Ukraine, married a Ukrainian folklorist, and was influential both as a co-collector of folklore and as an author of stories often decrying the evils of serfdom and poverty.

Ivan Franko (1856-1915)

Franko (honored in the name of the city Ivano-Frankivsk) wrote in almost every literary and scholarly genre, and he is considered the first modern poet in Ukrainian. He also translated multiple classics of world literature into Ukrainian.

Ol’ha Kobylians’ka (1863-1942)

Feminist and intellectual, some of her early works were written in German. She is known both for her prose and for her epistolary writings.

Lesia Ukraïnka

Larissa Kosach (1871-1913) wrote in various genres, especially poetry and plays, under this pseudonym that means “Lesia the Ukrainian woman.” She also translated literary works from various European languages into Ukrainian. Now considered an iconic classic and feminist foremother, she appears on the 200-hryvnia banknote.

The Slovo Building: 1920-30s

In the 1920s in Kharkiv, the then-capital of the new USSR, there was a brief flowering of regional literature.

Pre-War picture of the Slovo building: Slovo means Word, and the Cyrillic “S” looks like a C, a good shape for architecture that creates a strong courtyard. By Victor Vizu 

Part of this resurgence was concentrated in the Slovo building. Many poets and other writers lived there. When in the late 1920s or 1930s a lot of them were arrested and shot in basements or shipped off by Stalin’s secret police into the Gulag to die they became known as “the executed renaissance:”

The Executed Renaissance – an outstanding generation of Ukrainian poets born in or around the 1890s that was almost entirely wiped out by Stalinist repression. Just a partial list includes Mykhailo Boychuk (1882-1937), Les Kurbas (1887-1937), Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), Klym Polishchuk (1891-1937), Mykola Kulish (1892-1937), Mykhailo Semenko (1892-1937), Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933), Mykhailo Yalovy (1895-1937), Mykhailo (Mike) Yohansen (1895-1937), Veronika Cherniakhivska (1900-1938), and Valerian Pidmohylny (1901-1937).

Lina Kostenko (b. 1930)

Active as a poet, journalist, prose author and publisher, Kostenko was also a Soviet-era dissident. She helped to revive the repressed tradition of Ukrainian lyric poetry, and she has published over a dozen books of poetry.

Emma Andijewska (b. 1931)

Born in Donetsk, poet, writer, and painter Andijewska emigrated as a child and has lived in the United States and Germany. Her poetry has been called surrealist and has been translated into English and German.

Vasyl Stus (1938-1985)

Stus was a poet, translator, literary critic, and dissident. Publication of his poetry was limited by his two terms in Soviet labor camps, though he has been translated into foreign languages, and he died in a camp, becoming a symbol of dissidence and resistance.

Oleh Lysheha (1949-2014)

Banned from publication in the Soviet period, Lysheha became successful in the years of “perestroika,” and translations of his poetry have won significant literary prizes.

Yuri Andrukhovich (b. 1960)

Andrukhovych is especially prominent as a founder of the Bu-Ba-Bu poetic collective, and his novels have been translated into multiple languages, often with prizewinning results.

Oksana Zabuzhko (b. 1960)

Zabuzhko shocked the literary system with her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), now considered one of the most important works of that decade. She has published poetry, prose, and non-fiction, and she has received several important literary prizes and fellowships.

Taras Chubay (b. 1970)

Poet and musician (and son of the poet Hryts’ko Chubay [1949-1982]), Chubay has recorded multiple albums and successfully set the poetry of others named here to music.

Victoria Amelina (1986-2023)

Amelina died under bombardment by Russian forces while working in journalism at the age of 37; she had published only two novels and had received several important literary awards and recognition.

Solovki

In the early post-Soviet year of 1995, I visited the island of Solovki in the White Sea where the Soviets had transformed a venerable monastery into one of the first islands of the “Gulag archipelago.” I stepped into the small museum that memorialized the era and looked at the pictures of the inmates, yellow and sepia lit from behind. I was surprised at how many of the men pictured were identified as “Ukrainian poet,” and I wondered how on earth, and why, they had wound up on Solovki, over 2000 kilometers from Kharkiv or Kyiv? The executed renaissance was still unknown to me then. More recently, the Orthodox Church, once again running the monastery, took over the Solovki Museum and gradually reduced the size of the Gulag section until it was closed completely in 2016.

Poetics

I hadn’t read much poetry in Ukrainian until I began to translate Ukrainian poetry, but I started to feel the difference between Russian and Ukrainian poetics. Until recently Russophone poetry has been more traditional, shaped by rhyme and meter, or as we would say in the Anglosphere, “more formal.” A lot of it still is, I think, that traditionalism reflected the “deep freeze” of the Stalin years. In Soviet Russia, beginning in the 1930s, poets were retreating to “safe” poetic forms, which meant rhyming syllabotonic verse, in fear of being accused of disloyalty and, perhaps, in hope of preserving the best aspects of Russian poetry from before the Revolution. The underground poets could do what they liked, but it wasn’t a career. Part of Ukraine was outside the USSR between the two World Wars, and I think this made a difference.

Askold Melnyczuk’s translation of a short poem by Taras Shevchenko was published in The New Yorker magazine in October 2023 (see the link below). What a coup to get a poet whose dates are 1814-1861 into a major literary and cultural magazine!  (what a coup!) It pays to be a well-known writer and editor yourself, in terms of getting a poet whose dates are 1814-1861 into a major literary and cultural magazine. Melnyczuk gives the poem a very modern-looking format, but he also maintains the rhythm and the rhyme: “sleep” and “keep,” “grass” and “ask.” The recent poems in the portfolio (links above) are markedly more free in their forms, though the songs of Zhadan and the Dogs keep rhyming, as songs tend to do.

War influences what is written and remembered

Poetry has the “selfish genes” of sound and rhythm that make it easier to memorize, to carry at least part of your library with you into prison or exile. If the neighbors invade (claiming that they’re your brothers while also claiming you are Nazis), even as you fight back you want to get the word out that you DO have a culture.

Imagine your country has spent centuries in the shadow of its neighbor, with its best writers either appropriated (like Nikolai Gogol’, known in Ukraine as Mykola Hohol) or repressed (Shevchenko), or outright murdered (…too many Ukrainian poets; I’ll just name Vasyl Stus, who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1986, not so long before the end of the USSR). You too might feel like advancing the importance of your own culture’s poetry and other writing.

War and politics influence what poetry is translated into English

I indulge in this informational barrage so that you understand how things have changed for Anglophone readers now, even if the change is due to this awful war. The news from Ukraine is horrible, the stalemate is so frustrating, and yet the emergence of this poetry into English is exciting and cheering. There’s a whole bunch of scholars who love translating poetry, and this is a way they can help immediately. They’ll even be grateful and relieved that they can help in this way. I want to describe all the new reading we can do, even as it’s hard to rejoice when the news most days is bad. A student in the US can now read these translations and fall in love with their authors and what the authors are doing.

We can’t read the poetry without being aware of the situation if we follow the news at all: the worse it is, the more kids are killed, the more it makes it into the headlines. Because the war is impacting everyone in Ukraine—as well as everyone who has had to leave, or even people who emigrated a long time ago but have ties there—most of the recent writing is about the war too.

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Translating for Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine

I was surprised but pleased to be invited to contribute to a translation project that became the 2017 collection Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. The collection was co-edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, both poets and translators themselves; they started work after the slow war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014 with Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea and gradual infiltration/invasion of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Some of the translators had experience with this kind of work, like Penn State University Professor Michael Naydan, who has translated numerous Ukrainian writers as well as Russian, or Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, who have been translating Serhiy Zhadan and bringing him to Yara Arts in New York for decades. The book was published in 2017, attracting a lot of positive attention, and Oksana and Max later won the 2023 Translation Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies for their translation of The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska.

Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky asked so many people to make translations in part to get the book published quickly. Poetry translates relatively fast, but it still takes time to get it right. Plus, having different voices for the various poets is not at all a bad thing.

I was selected even though I don’t know Ukrainian well. The more Slavic languages one knows, the more vocabulary overlaps. While I worked on translating Halyna Kruk and a couple of other Ukrainian poets, I relied on Mary Kalyna (who once upon a time started kindergarten in Philadelphia speaking only Ukrainian) and Bohdan Pechenyak, a more recent émigré from Ukraine. And as someone who's had success in the past (I've won a couple of translation prizes - one for poetry from Croatian, two for Russian) I probably likely to do a better job than a well-intentioned beginner to poetry translation.

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Orcs

Just one more anecdote for you… About a month after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, the Ukrainians sank a Russian landing ship called the Orsk. The news was greeted with jokes on Facebook because Ukrainians had been referring to soldiers in the Russian Army there as Orcs (borrowed, obviously, from Tolkien). Someone not Ukrainian commented that the Ukrainians were just making fun because of the sound of the name, that they had no idea where Orsk was. It’s a city in Siberia, these days just north of Kazakhstan. But in fact when the cult poet Shevchenko (1814-1861) was arrested under Tsar Nicholas I and forcibly conscripted into the Russian Imperial army, he was sent to Orsk. Ukrainians know very well what and where Orsk is and what it means; for them, the town’s name is associated with the death of the Ukrainian poet at 47. He eventually made it back to St Petersburg, but his health was ruined by the difficult years of exile—in Orsk and elsewhere.

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Further Reading

Books:

  • Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: A Bouquet for Victoria Amelina (ed. Askold Melnyczuk, 2023)
  • Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (2023, ed. Ostap Kin)
  • A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023, Halyna Kruk)
  • How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poetry (2023, Serhiy Zhadan)
  • In the Hour of War (2023, eds. Caroline Forché and Ilya Kaminsky)
  • Today Is a Different War (2023, Ludmila Khersonska)
  • Voices of Freedom: Contemporary Writing from Ukraine (2023, ed. Kataryna Kazimirova and Daryna Anastasieva)
  • The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear (2022, Borys and Lyudmyla Khersonsky)
  • Ukrainian American Poets Respond (2022, ed. Virlana Tkacz)
  • The Voices of Babyn Yar (2022, Marianna Kiyanovs’ka)
  • What We Live for, What We Die for (2019, Serhiy Zhadan)
  • The White Chalk of Days (2018, ed. Mark Andryczyk)
  • Words for War (2017, ed. Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky)

Online: