Maksym Kryvtsov, ‘Amid voicing’

trans. by 
Helena Kernan

***

Amid voicing
and amid silence
among the trees and the insects
and a fearsome metal seagull.

Amid
heavy gloom
and dead light
in the sour milk of dawn
in the labyrinth of the trenches
with the Minotaur of war.

Amid charred trees
amid roads
shattered
like a pair of glasses
dropped on the ground
amid the ghosts
of the living and the dead.

Amid the heat
rising from weapons
amid the music
of machine gun rounds
amid the bass
of loaded artillery.

It appears,
like morning mist
like acne on a teenager’s cheeks
like wrinkles
like cracks in old houses
like ladders in nylon tights:

A smile of silence
memories of a lost warmth
a poem.

 

Translated by Helena Kernan from: Maksym Krvytsov, Вірші з бійниці: Поезії (Nash Format, 2024), pp. 38–39.

Tanya Savchynska

Tanya Savchynska is a literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was a 2019 resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in Canada and a 2023 resident at the Art Omi Translation Lab in the US. Her writing and translations have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Apofenie, and elsewhere. Her translation of Kateryna Zarembo’s Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s was published by Academic Studies Press in 2024.

Martin Lohrer
Cover Image for Culture as Security

Culture as Security

This issue of the London Ukrainian Review takes a look at culture as a matter of national security. Highlighting the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms, it also examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.

Sasha Dovzhyk