Translator’s Note

Prior to my becoming aware of Lyudmyla Diadchenko’s poetry in 2021, her English translations were made by fellow Ukrainians whose sense of the English tongue was dictated by syntactical sensibilities germane to Ukrainian but awkward in English. Despite their frequently puzzling constructions, what shone through most vividly were Diadchenko’s keen intelligence and poetic precision. I thought I could help and offered my services. I am likely of Ukrainian extraction on my mother’s side, and took a keen interest in Ukrainian literature as early as the 1990s, especially due to the six-volume Women’s Voices in Ukrainian Literature (1998-2000) published by Language Lanterns Publication and the shorter anthology, From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine (1996)from Glas Publishers and Zephyr Press. My readings exposed me most notably to the plays of Lesya Ukraïnka, the short stories of Olha Kobylianska, and the poetry of both Oleh Lysheha and Vasyl Stus. I am admittedly not fluent in Ukrainian; however, one advantage of the Internet age is the ready availability of Ukrainian-English dictionaries online. My process begins with a painstaking, word-by-word translation using three such dictionaries, followed by a restructuring of the text to make it sensible in English. Having devoted my life to writing poetry, I trusted my poetic instincts to compensate for not knowing Ukrainian. Once I’ve created a coherent translation, I send the drafts to Dr. Diadchenko herself, who corrects any mistakes (the online dictionaries, it turns out, don’t always agree!) and fills me in on nuances I may have missed—cultural allusions to Ukrainian folktales, for instance. Her advisory role in my translations is therefore critical, and we do not submit the poems for publication until we’ve both agreed they are ready.

I have not considered Diadchenko a “war-time poet” because I began translating her work in March 2021, eleven months before the full-scale Russian assault began in February of 2022 (since 2014, Russian aggression had been confined to occupying the Crimean peninsula and a soft invasion—encouraging and supplying pro-Muscovite uprisings—of the eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, together known as the Donbas), though after the war began I expected its horrors to emerge in her writing. Reflecting on the war-time poems contained in the American poet H.D.’s Trilogy (H.D. survived the bombing of London during both world wars), I encouraged such writing, thinking it would be personally cathartic and relevant also as historical testimony. But Dr. Diadchenko steadfastly refuses to write directly about the hostilities, despite the upheaval it has caused her personally. Her aesthetic sensibilities persuade her that such writing is inherently propagandistic and a betrayal of poetry as art. And yet, inevitably, the war seeps through, as her poetry since Russia’s 2022 invasion, amplified by her current residence in Sweden, frequently visits themes of psychic and linguistic isolation; in the untitled poem beginning “Here are stones and moss,” she refers to herself as “a beast that’s lost the trail—azimuth, scent” and declares, “my soul is reduced / to a foreign alphabet.” Like every Ukrainian, she has lost loved ones to the violence of this war, and those losses must surely be as shattering as the missiles and bullets themselves.

An aside: my studies at Coe College in Cedar Rapids gave me frequent access to professors from the writing programs at the University of Iowa. Through my advisor, Charles Aukema, whose MFA was earned at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I had the extraordinary honor of meeting Paul Engle, founder of Iowa’s International Writing Program, on several occasions. His passion for presenting international poetry to an English-speaking audience rubbed off on me and is at least one reason I bring such enthusiasm to translating Lyudmyla Diadchenko.

—Padma Thornlyre