Maksym Kryvtsov, ‘My head rolls from tree to tree’

trans. by 
Helena Kernan
 and 
Larissa Babij

***

My head rolls from tree to tree
like tumbleweed
or a ball
my severed hands
will sprout in spring as violets
my legs
will be pulled apart by cats and dogs
my blood
will stain the world a new shade of red
Pantone Human Blood
my bones
will reach into the earth
forming a skeletal frame
my bullet-riddled rifle
will rust
poor thing
my spare clothes and kit
will go to the new recruits
if only spring would hurry up
so I can finally
bloom
as a violet.

 


Translated by Helena Kernan and Larissa Babij. First posted by the author on his Facebook page on January 5, 2024, republished on: https://www.voice-of-soldiers-heart.org.ua


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