JUNE/JULY The Linguist 7
@Linguist_CIOL
FEATURES
O
n 24 February 2022, the Russian
Federation mounted a brutal, full-
scale military invasion against
Ukraine. Like many members of the Ukrainian
diaspora, I was glued to my smartphone,
following the fierce Ukrainian resistance with
awe and gratitude, desperately trying to get
in touch with friends and colleagues in
Ukraine, figuring out ways to help.
During these early days of the war,
Ukrainian poets – many of them women –
began sharing poetry on social media,
primarily on Facebook. These powerful
pieces became the community's act of
literary and spiritual resistance against an
enemy that continues to seek to silence
Ukrainian voices through violent acts of war
and propaganda. This poetry became my
lifeline too – even though I was reading it
from oceans away in Kansas, USA.
On 5 March, I saw a call for translations
shared by my dear friend and colleague Vitaly
Chernetsky, a Ukrainian-American professor
and translator.
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I was moved to contribute. I
reached out to Halyna Kruk, a notable
Ukrainian poet and children's author living in
my birth city of L'viv, whose poem 'You
Stand with Your Little "No War" Sign' I had
been re-reading over and over since it was
posted on Facebook a few days earlier. My
translation of the poem was published in
National Translation Month's special issue on
Ukraine and in the International Human
Rights Art Festival journal, IHRAF Writes.
This was just the beginning. Partnering with
the excellent people at Chytomo, a Ukrainian
literary journal which has been publishing
war poetry in both Ukrainian and English, I
began to translate poetry alongside other
translators engaged in this effort.
My previous translation experience came
as a linguistics-obsessed migrant high-
schooler, undergraduate and, eventually,
graduate student. I spent many happy hours
translating the epic poetry and prose I was
studying in languages from Medieval Welsh
to Aramaic. There is a special pleasure in
morpheme-by-morpheme interlinear
translation with annotation and commentary.
Such translation – framed by many of my
historical linguistics professors as the most
faithful – emphasised accuracy that would
lead to a deep understanding of the source
text grammatically, lexically and culturally.
This kind of translation exists as a scaffolding
for the source text, allowing the scholar to
be moved by the original voice. Such
translation is a private act, not intended for
publication. Later in life, I began publishing
poetry and fiction in English, but the
R B Lemberg considers their translations of Ukrainian war poets,
which reflect their own emotional response to the original poems
POETRY OF WAR
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