Wartime in Ukraine
A gathering of Ukrainian poets portray the horror of war
“Between hate & love/ once a forest towered, and houses, houses./ No trees now. Fire, fire. No buildings./ Between love & hate, see us. We walk upright./ Clarity is so instant that not everyone remembers to shut their eyes.” (Ostap Slyvynsky)
In the time of war, poets are perhaps uniquely poised to express the inexpressible — the horrors of combat, suffering and displacement, death, dismemberment and cultural erasure. Coeditor Carolyn Forché, a poet of fierce human rights activism herself (“Against Forgetting,” “What You Have Heard Is True”), notes in her introduction to this powerful collection of war poetry that language “challenges attempts to obliterate the truth of history,” such as denial of the Holodomor, the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union from 1932-33.
Here, 27 Ukrainian poets (in excellent translations) attempt to articulate what has been happening to their people and country since the invasion by Russia in February 2022. Indeed, they remind us, the war has been ongoing since 2014, when Russia seized the Crimea, and well before, as Lesyk Panasiuk comments on the running history of Ukrainian writers long subjected to Russian violence and coercion:
“Russian soldiers are cooking a soup with vegetables snatched from our/ barns and refrigerators/ they are tossing our / books / to light the stove./ Burning are the fine editions of the youngest Ukrainians poets…/ and so on until the end of Ukrainian literature” (“Our Faces, Tossed about This Land”).
Panasiuk escaped Bucha, the site of a Russian massacre, and in the opening poem “In the Hospital Rooms of My Country” he writes: “Letters of the alphabet go to war/ clinging to one another, standing up, forming words no one wants to shout,/ sentences that are blown by the mines in the avenues, stories/ shelled by multiple rocket launches.”
In one poem (“New Song of Silence”), Anastasia Afanasieva portrays fleeing her native Kharkiv under bombardment. She starts out in Russian, then switches to Ukrainian: “as we are building a barricade inside our lungs/ from the enemy’s/ language which is now strained with drops of blood.” She writes that she is now “glad to forget” the language in which she wrote her former poems. “Thieves and executioners/ language/ will be chased to your lair/ …a new song will be heard/ the new song of quiet/ which / at what cost to our hands?”
The cost is horrendous. Living in fear (“it’s good that you don’t see a thing/ and don’t hear a thing. Say to anyone not a thing./ Slip nothing in your bra. Keep nothing/ … if, my brave, you look back, my brave: you say nothing” — Lyudmyla Khersonska); fleeing with as little as possible (“Take only what is most important…./ You will not return, and friends will never come back” — Serhiy Zhadan); and learning to live with loss (“carefully stepping over the things she left,/ books and clothes, fragments of a May night/ … where walls, windows, stairways, and stagnant darkness/ settle in the dregs” — Zhadan).
Many write about silence involving fear, collaboration, the stunning absence of those who fled to the West, depopulated villages, or the moment before the explosion. In the poem “He Writes,” Kateryna Kalytko imagines the soldier writing home to his mother: “You cry so much, mother, you don’t stop sobbing./ …. Your hair, I still remember, smells of cornflowers./ They all want something from us and keep stirring/ the anthill of the army, in which the country lies like a rotting fish.”
Editors Forché and Ilya Kaminsky (“The Deaf Republic”) present a resounding, intimate collection of voices from Ukraine, with short biographies of the poets and the translators at the back. It’s hard to fathom that we have entered another era of never-ending wars, such as those in the Middle East, but here we are, as Ekaterina Derisheva writes in “Houses Discuss”: “houses discuss with each other/ where the projectile exploded/ and the glass lenses/ were blown to shreds/ only natural light remains/ and air instead of food and water.”