Since the war in Ukraine started, we’ve seen a wave of interest in Ukrainian history and culture in general, and in Ukrainian literature in particular. Publishers and literary translators are struggling to keep up with this increasing demand for Ukrainian translations and literature.
A translation of a poem by contemporary Ukrainian poet Oleksandr Kocharyan by Anna Lordan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Institute London's Translation Prize and published in a special edition of the London Ukrainian Review dedicated to Victoria Amelina. (24 August 2023, Issue Three)
London Ukrainian Review is a special publication of the Ukrainian Institute London which covers an array of topics –from literature and art to politics and the environment, including intellectual essays, reportage, poetry, short fiction, and visual art.
Oleksandr Kocharyan was born in 1985 in Kharkiv. He earned a degree in psychology from Kharkiv Karazin National University. He currently lives in Ivano-Frankivsk. He is known for his publications on online platforms such as Litcentr and Soloneba. He has also published a collection of poetry Мікропластік / Mikroplastik.
Anna received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University and trained for seven years as a monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center in Murphys, California. Her research and teaching focus on the interactions between literature and attention. She is currently writing an article on the dynamics of attention in Iryna Tsilyk's 2020 film Земля блакитна, ніби апельсин (The Earth is Blue as an Orange).
Anna has spent two summers taking courses at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. In 2022, she took the Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course with Volodymyr Dibrova, and this summer she returned to take two more courses: Ukraine in the World: Exploring Contemporary Ukraine with Emily Channell-Justice, and Tradition and Modernity in Ukraine, 19th and 20th Centuries, with Serhiy Bilenky.
Explaining why she chose this poem for translation, Anna Lordan said:
“I came across the Oleksandr Kocharyan poem on the Soloneba website, loved the poem, and wanted to support the Ukrainian Institute London's project by participating! So I submitted my translation, and it was chosen for publication in a special issue of the London Ukrainian Review dedicated to Victoria Amelina.”
“I chose this poem for translation because I was so struck by the quiet, steady simplicity of it. The outbreak of the war is not explicitly mentioned; it is there instead in between the two points of “when” in the poem: “коли чекали війни” and “коли залишили місто". The burning pipeline is “у іншому районі”. It is not a poem of high drama. It is a poem of relationships and intimacy -- intimacy with objects, with people, intimacy with people expressed through objects: the relationships between the “I” of the poem and the physical objects he gathers up in preparation for outbreak of war, the relationship between the “I” of the poem and his mother, and the expression of the relationship between the “I” of the poem and his mother in the desire for the mother to have these physical objects. Rather than high drama, there is a rise-and-fall patterning. The rise of energy in gathering items, not knowing they were needed, and the energetic “fall” or landing into “we didn’t need them”, in the lines:
не знав, чи знадобляться. не знадобились.
And the rise of energy in the attempt to convince the mother to take the things, and the fall of: “I don’t need them”:
вмовляю забрати чайник та спиртівку та пальне. каже ти що, не треба, то ж у іншому районі.
There are no named emotions or emotional descriptors in the poem. The poem is instead a process of intimacy: intimacy with the rise and fall of energy, with the undulation between expectation and reality, with an attempt to relate through the giving of objects. I am struck by how this all produces a sense of such intimacy with existence - that named emotions, as abstractions, would not have done.
In this way, there is to me a sweetness, a tenderness, an innocence, to the poem. The poem is an expression of – and, reading it, brings us to – intimacy, simplicity, love. It is a stunning example of the power of poetry to express, and bring us to, those qualities of our human experience that cannot be destroyed by war.”
Anna added:
“I am deeply grateful to the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute for offering such substantial, in-depth, and much-needed, training in Ukrainian language, history, society, and culture. And I am committed to continuing to apply and develop the knowledge and skills I have learned from my teachers at HUSI in my teaching, research, and translation. Much gratitude all round!”
The original poem by Oleksandr Kocharyan on the Soloneba website.