(From A New Orthography, by Serhiy Zhadan)
We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part one)
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A friend of mine volunteered.
He came back six months later.
Who knows where he was.
He won’t say what he’s afraid of.
But he’s afraid of something.
Sometimes it seems
he’s afraid of everything.
He left a normal person.
But he talked too much.
About everything in this world.
About everything he came across.
And he came back
completely changed, as if
someone took his old tongue
and didn’t leave him a new one.
So he sits in his bed every day
and listens to the demons in his head.
The first demon is ferocious,
he pours out white heat, demands
punishment for all the living.
The second demon is submissive,
talks about forgiveness,
speaks quietly,
touches his heart with hands
covered in black soil.
But the worst is the third demon.
He agrees with the other two.
He agrees, doesn’t object.
As soon as he speaks
the headaches begin.
--translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
It’s been nine years since I last blogged for BAP, opening with my salutations from Sifnos, Greece, my former home away from home, at the height of that country’s economic crisis. I presented a trio of documents addressing Greece’s dilemma at that time: whether or not to accept EU-imposed austerity measures or to leave the union—or at least to drop the euro in favor of a return to the drachma. None of those radical changes happened, precisely as one of my savviest informants predicted, despite the national referendum three years later (July, 2015, when the people voted in favor of rejecting the austerity measures). But as we all knew would happen, Greece survived. If all goes well, this summer they will also continue to be among the first countries in the EU to welcome back international guests with few restrictions.
In addition to a couple of personal meditations, that week I wrote extensively about serving as poetry editor for The Common. We had just completed our first year of publication then, and all was new, ranging from provisional to speculative, fingers always crossed; we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a beautiful new issue and a big Zoom party this past year. Yes, I’m being a bit dry and craggy, like that Greek island, about the party. But really, in all seriousness, we have had Zoom events with contributors reading their work from their homes throughout the US, Europe, and the Middle East. We got everyone together with a smaller carbon footprint. And—at least I waited a paragraph to say it—we did the best we could to gather our broad community face-beside-face in real time during the pandemic.
This week my focus with these posts will be a little narrower, sticking to a goal of offering some of the best contemporary American poetry, growing primarily from the work I do at The Common, but also from my recent experience as a judge for the National Book Award in poetry. It amuses me to think that I used to take what I called “screen-free Saturdays,” my sabbath. During the pandemic (and with family overseas, not yet vaccinated, I know it’s not over and I don’t write in the past tense) I gave that practice up. The NBA deliberations were screen-centered, both through Zoom meetings and through reading the 250 books on a Kindle. Yes, that’s right, we read virtually all 250 of the entered titles on a Kindle smaller than my hand. But I was lucky to have been with a fine group of judges through this period, people who led with kindness, curiosity, and generosity from start to finish. The National Book Foundation’s directors and staff met the unprecedented obstacles presented by the early months of the pandemic with grace, humor, and ingenuity. There was a great spirit of camaraderie, and working with them all made it much easier to get through 2020.
While I did quietly attend to my own book of poems in progress throughout the last “year and,” most of my energy has gone into reading vast screens of new American poetry—and a fair bit of Ukrainian poetry. With Ostap Kin I co-translated A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, the most significant voice in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, and one of Eastern Europe’s most critically acclaimed authors. The book we translated doesn’t exist in Ukrainian, and now that I have more translation experience I realize that’s important to note.
Let me explain: we set out to do a volume of Selected Poems spanning Zhadan’s career, but quickly changed our minds. For one thing, Ostap was in close contact with Zhadan, and the poet gave him access to brand new poems, poems that hadn’t even been published in Ukrainian yet, including all of the work in Catalogue of Ships, Zhadan’s 2020 volume. We decided early on to observe what Zhadan has said many times, that his career can be divided into a before and an after around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A New Orthography, then, is a selection of poems written since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 to present), and with the lives of civilians, soldiers, and veterans during wartime as their focus. Zhadan even wrote an introduction to this book, in addition to the translators’ introduction, about his own trips to the US and his engagement with American poets and poetry; the introductions and the poems are presented in a bilingual edition.
A New Orthography came out in the first month of the pandemic, before we all had figured out how to do launch parties and book tours online—it was sad to see this book go out into the world at such a time. What one wants is a reader, a few readers, as many good readers as possible, and towards that end we had published the individual Zhadan poems in journals throughout the US and even the New Statesman in the UK from the earliest days of our translation process. The press (Lost Horse Press, Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, distributed by University of Washington Press) and we did our best, and there were a few small reviews, but at least one big anticipated review never happened, and we were really at a loss about what to do other than follow through with the couple of articles and self-interviews we were invited to contribute to journals.
Everyone was still figuring out what the pandemic meant and how it was to be survived. Everything was uncertain, especially for the sick and those on the front lines, health care workers and hospital staff, and even the multinational big pharma companies and their vaccine efforts. What it meant for poets and writers, for books and magazines, what it meant for publishers and librarians and booksellers, who have done what they can remotely, or even in person, masked and “distanced,” well, we have a better idea now, but the smoke hasn’t cleared and the changes to the economy and our practices haven’t been calculated.
(They buried their son last winter), by Serhiy Zhadan
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They buried their son last winter.
Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.
They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.
Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say.
He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows?
Will it change anything, they say, what’s the point now?
I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need.
And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.
It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges.
I know so many things about you, but who’d listen?
I know, for example, the song you used to sing.
I know your sister. I always had a thing for her.
I know what you were afraid of, and why, even.
Who you met that winter, what you told him.
The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now.
You always played for a neighboring school.
But who did you fight for?
To come here every year, to weed dry grass.
To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.
To see the calm after tragedy every year.
To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people.
The birds disappear behind waves of rain.
To ask forgiveness for your sins.
But what do I know about your sins?
To beg the rain to finally stop.
It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.
--translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
Shortly after A New Orthography came out, Ostap invited me to work with him on another project, an anthology of Ukrainian poems about Babyn Yar, the Holocaust massacre that claimed the lives of between 100,000 and 150,000 people in Kyiv (1941-1943), that he was editing. To be clearer than the Soviet censors—who insisted that the people killed were “Soviet citizens” and persecuted poets who wrote about Babyn Yar as a massacre of Jewish people—the vast majority of the people killed were Jewish. In fact, in two days, early in the occupation of Kyiv, between September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi soldiers shot and killed 33,771 Jews at the site of the ravine. (Babyn Yar means “grandma’s ravine.”) The massacres continued over the next two years, and poets have been writing about Babyn Yar since the fall of 1941 to the present.
Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond also is a book that doesn’t already exist. In other words, we didn’t translate a Ukrainian collection; instead, Ostap put the book together himself. He is an archivist, and he flexes his skills with this project, having chosen poems spanning the last eight decades, many of them found in newspapers and other periodicals. He annotates and offers a publishing history for each poem and has written an extensive introduction, a bibliography, biographies of the poets, and a geographical note. We started this project last June and have just finished. It’s under contract but I don’t know if I’m at liberty to say anything further.
While we were working on this anthology, we received exciting news: A New Orthography was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. We celebrated over FaceTime and kept working. Sometimes I do bless the screen. The Zhadan book began to receive notice on social media platforms, and the poems are available, both online and in print. Ultimately the book was a finalist for the PEN Award, and it’s presently shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize. As my experience as a judge has shown me, just being in the conversation is great, and I’m grateful, as is Ostap. I’m also grateful for the opportunity to present a few of Zhadan’s poems in translation here.
We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part four), by Serhiy Zhadan
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He’s been away for two years,
she hesitated.
Change the lock?
Or not?
Will he come back?
Or not?
In the end, she didn’t change the lock.
Probably, she unconsciously expected
him to come back.
He would return and she would tell him everything.
About her take on him,
about her take on all of this—
she would definitely tell him.
And about her terminated pregnancy.
Which he knew nothing about these past two years.
And when he came back
(without keys, actually, he lost them somewhere),
she wouldn’t say anything.
And neither would he.
In general, they decided to talk less.
Especially about politics.
Talking about politics in our situation
is the same as talking about death in a TB ward—
someone there definitely won’t like it.
And here no matter what you say—everything is politics.
Bread on the table—politics.
The school around the corner—politics.
The early spring that fills the sky with sweet smoke—
also politics.
Politics in gestures, politics in breathing,
politics in vocal cords
that need rest.
They got into a fight on the third day,
a fight over the shower.
In the morning, he collects his stuff again.
She watches the sky like milk
that is about to simmer.
It’s too late for us to learn joy and consolation.
It’s too late to fix the floodgates when so much water has passed through.
Life is like a house where a person is found hanging.
It’s too late to choose the right words.
It’s too late to install a new lock.
--translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
