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The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear
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September 26, 2022
I am so enthralled by the concept of publishing the same poem translated multiple ways in the same volume! "they are there, humanitarians with their inverted eyes" vs "Behind them, little humanitarians, heads facing the wrong way" (vs my attempt via Google Translate of "behind them are humanitarian little men with the opposite head"). Or "we are unfreebirds good night sweet prints turning read / shines the black sun the no one's rose of a shell shard" vs "we're captive birds dear brother that's it that's all / black sun of melancholy shines like a shrapnel hole". How many poems within one poem? How many cadences? How many voices? How many lives? This should be a wider trend, as should the publishing of the poem in the original language alongside the translation.
Not easy to read, as nothing about or by Ukrainians is currently easy to read. Though the poems themselves are quite short, with the longest being about a bunch of debating rabbis (fitting!). "I read with an accent," about the act of giving up one language for another*, especially stuck with me - "Tongue / behind teeth, lip pressed to lip, phonetics / and linguistics drown me in me; / morphology whips dances around my body holding hands / with semantics I even think with an accent / Descartes might say I breathe with an accent..." - makes me think of Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love. Which also made me think a lot about language as politics and what is lost or gained in translation! At this point I may have no choice but to learn to read Ukrainian.
10/10 drowning in how words work
*The intro notes that one of the poets, Boris Khersonsky, made the choice to stop writing in his native Russian in favor of Ukrainian after Russia's 2014 invasion, a choice that I've read is becoming ever more common especially since Feb 2022. The intro asks, "what does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language?" and in the next few years we are going to find out.
Not easy to read, as nothing about or by Ukrainians is currently easy to read. Though the poems themselves are quite short, with the longest being about a bunch of debating rabbis (fitting!). "I read with an accent," about the act of giving up one language for another*, especially stuck with me - "Tongue / behind teeth, lip pressed to lip, phonetics / and linguistics drown me in me; / morphology whips dances around my body holding hands / with semantics I even think with an accent / Descartes might say I breathe with an accent..." - makes me think of Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love. Which also made me think a lot about language as politics and what is lost or gained in translation! At this point I may have no choice but to learn to read Ukrainian.
10/10 drowning in how words work
*The intro notes that one of the poets, Boris Khersonsky, made the choice to stop writing in his native Russian in favor of Ukrainian after Russia's 2014 invasion, a choice that I've read is becoming ever more common especially since Feb 2022. The intro asks, "what does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language?" and in the next few years we are going to find out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review