Posts filed under 'ukraine'

Translation Tuesday: “Here’s the Sun for You” by Vasyl Stus

learn to play this exciting game about war: imagine the enemy all around you, they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.

This Translation Tuesday, the unnerving poetry of Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet Vasyl Stus furnishes a haunting glimpse into the suffocating atmosphere of Ukraine in the Soviet era–all too resonant as Ukrainians once again struggle to survive in wartime. Hear from translators Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray on Joyful Cemetery, the collection of poetry from which “Here’s the Sun for You” is taken, written two years before Stus’s arrest for dissidence and subsequent death in a Soviet forced labor camp in 1985: “Stus’s most politically radical volume, it [Joyful Cemetery] exposes, with a Kafkaesque subversion of logic, the grotesque nature of the Soviet totalitarian state. The running theme in the entire collection is the struggle, both as a human and as a Ukrainian dissident, to stay alive – free and authentic – in the kingdom of the living dead, which is rife with lies, artificiality, violence, and conformism.”

Here’s the sun for you, said the man with the cockade on his cap
and pulled out a nickel that looked like a tiny sun.
And here’s the road for you: he made a few steps to the right
and drew the edge of it with the toe of his boot.
To help you feel cheerful—turn on these tape-players and radios,
pick up these rattles
and bang them, bang them against your heads.
To avoid getting thirsty or hungry—
listen to the lectures and watch these popular films
about how happily you will all live
once you make it to the hereafter.
To avoid the rain dripping
down your necks—
remember:
every downpour
eventually ends
even the flood
from the windows
of heaven.
When you are cold—start singing these songs.
He handed out a sheaf of stamped lyrics
(approved by the censors for singing
in groups of two, three,
and even more voices).
When you feel that you need to rest,
learn to play this exciting game about war:
imagine the enemy all around you,
they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.
In a word, shoot at them, throw yourselves
onto machine gun nests
and fall under tanks.
Just don’t start running, he added.
Our kind benefactor!
Who would want to run from this paradise?
we cried in unison
as we struggled to see into the eyes
under the beak of the cap:
they looked like two drops of quicksilver.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray.

Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist and prolific translator. Widely recognized to be Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet, he has been celebrated for his intellectual, philosophical and psychological works engaged in radical self-exploration. Stus was also an uncompromising Soviet dissident. He grew up in Donetsk where he struggled against rampant Russification and later moved to Kyiv where his doctoral (and official poetic) work was cut short because of his public protest against the mass arrests of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals. For his aesthetically insurgent poetry, as well as his indefatigable fight for human and national rights, he was arrested in 1972 and spent the rest of his life in Soviet prison and the Gulag. He died in 1985 in the Perm-36 labor camp. Despite constant oppression, Stus produced several poetry collections, including Зимові дерева (Winter Trees, 1970), Веселий цвинтар (Joyful Cemetery, 1970) and his magnum opus volume Палімпсести (Palimpsests, 1980), which he wrote, against all odds, in the Gulag.

Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar and translator specializing in Ukraine’s twentieth-century and contemporary literature, currently based at the University of Potsdam (Germany). He completed his PhD on the works of Vasyl Stus at the University of Cambridge, where he taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies between 2018-2020. His essays and translations have appeared in literary magazines such as Los Angeles Review of Books and Apofenie. He is the author of The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (Berlin: FTS, 2021) and co-author of the verbatim play The Summer Before Everything (2016) on revolution and war in Ukraine. He is currently working on the first English-language monograph on Stus’s poetry.

Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Snowman’s Son” by Aleksandr Kabanov

I also am a snowman’s son, despoiled of hearing and sight

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver unflinching poetry from Ukraine that sheds cold light on the child victims of the Russian invasion. On translating Aleksandr Kabanov’s pioneering, at-times enigmatic style, translator Marina Eskina writes: “I chose ‘The Snowman’s Son’ for its expressiveness, force, and, last but not least, because it is more translatable. It includes Biblical references with some overtones from the Russian classical poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem The Prophet which in turn is an allusion to the scene from the Book of Isaiah. My goal as a translator was to preserve these references and allusions without ruining author’s stylistics. Such close reading and search for meanings brought me closer to deciphering Kabanov’s metaphorical universe.” 

The Snowman’s Son

The snow of war that flies askew
ignoring all the rules,
it fiercely pierces us through and through
but partly stays the course.

Snow rested the seventh useless wing
on earth’s frozen spine,
the other luckier six it brought
underground to his son.

There, underground, the rink of ice
glitters and melts with the laughs
of kids killed casually by war:
let’s mold them a dad of snow.

But death is eerily cunning,
it swaps the crown for a pail—
amidst the hasty castling—
a carrot for the cross and nails.

READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Charred Snow” by Deborah Kelly

and all words swallowed hard / on themselves.

In this edition of our column that spotlights literature expressing support for the citizens of Ukraine, we present Deborah Kelly’s poem, “Charred Snow.” Through tightly coiled lines, the poem evokes both the ongoing devastation and the inarticulable grief of victims of war. 

Charred Snow

Who sings a folksong on the steps of ruin
knows, there are words one swallows
under bombardment,
but I, in another town, could cry devastation,
as many times as it fell.
In the charred snow, burnt bread.
The least of it. To say devastation,
I cried sons, daughters.
But then, Bucha,
and all words swallowed hard
on themselves.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Alex Cigale, Guest Editor of the Atlanta Review’s Russian Poetry Issue

An interview with Alex Cigale on editing the Atlanta Review's Russian Poetry Issue

 

I interviewed Alex Cigale, guest editor for the Russia issue of the Atlanta Review, to pick his brain about the editing process, the special issue, and the state of Russian poetry at-large.

Alex Cigale (former Central Asia editor-at-large for Asymptote!) has collaborated with the editors of the anthologyCrossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000), and more recently, the online Twenty First Century Russian Poetry (Big Bridge 16, 2014). Independently, he has presented a score of contemporary Russian poets to Anglophone readers. This year, Cigale was the recipient of an NEA in Literary Translation for his work with poet of the St. Petersburg philological school, Mikhail Eremin.

The Atlanta Review is known for its long-established and respected annual contest, offering publication in each of its fall issues, with a $1,000 top prize and 20 publication awards for finalists (including 30 merit awards for semi-finalists). In its 20-year history, it has published a long list of established poets, including Seamus Heaney, Rachel Hadas, Maxine Kumin, Stephen Dunn, Charles Wright, Billy Collins, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and so on.

PN: What did the Atlanta Review ask from you for its Russia Issue? How did you approach the editorship and solicit contributions?

AC: My directions were quite open: curate an 80-page section of contemporary Russian poetry. In every Spring issue, the Atlanta Review includes an international feature. In recent years, it had shone a spotlight on international hotspots (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) as well as on Anglophone or partly-Anglophone nations in the news (India, Ireland, and Scotland, the latter forthcoming in 2016).

While each is planned two years in advance, the editorial phase itself is quite brief: in my case, I only had this past late fall/early winter to work on the curation, so its contents were largely determined by what unpublished work in translation was available at the moment. As I noted in my introduction, above all else, the issue is a “slice of life”—what (primarily American) translators of Russian poetry are working on right now. The world of Russian poetry translation is a fairly small community, so I was able to put out early word of the issue on social media and correspond with nearly each translator personally to discuss their projects. READ MORE…

This is also a Center-Point

"Her presence, her voice and her body language when communicating, was the key I had been missing."

I confess: I thought the most interesting thing about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was the cover. My edition had an old sepia-toned picture of two children—“the [something] sisters.” One has a boy’s haircut, and looks very unhappy. The other stands sweetly beside her. I found it so much more eloquent than the book itself, which seemed to me denser than a loaf of pumpernickel bread, denser than a steel ingot, denser than a white dwarf star. I don’t think I made it through the preface. If I did, it made the same kind of sense to me as reading À la recherche du temps perdu backwards, in French, while drunk. That is to say: the occasional glimmers of understanding felt fabulous, but it was all so ephemeral.

So when Judith Butler, together with fellow feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti on Monday evening in Oslo, met two members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot for a talk about politics, art and feminism, I was not expecting fireworks. Except for Pussy Riot, of course, who spoke through a balaclava and a voice distorter the last time I saw them. This time, they had ditched the disguises and spoke only through a translator. But I’m getting ahead of myself. And ahead of Judith Butler. READ MORE…

Pop Around the World: the Russian Invasion of 1962

Songs of revolution and regret

Though those Russian missiles never made it over from Cuba to the US in 1962, several Russian songs did hit their targets, flourishing in foreign ears even in the permafrostiest months of the Cold War.

Perhaps the best-known Russian tune out west is “Those Were The Days,” a song based on “Дорогой длинною,” pioneered by Ukrainian-born cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky (who recorded the version embedded above) and written by Russian composer Boris Fomin to lyrics by Konstantin Podrevskii. Read in translation, the song sings of grief and of regret for past joys gone too soon:

READ MORE…