Conversations: Olga Livshin, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Ali Kinsella
As I write this, Russia has just invaded Ukraine. Another violent power grab by fragile egos and broken souls under the psychosis of nationalism. Another period of intense suffering for the people of Ukraine—and who can say where this will lead. Certainly not me. Instead, we bring you this enlightening conversation about Ukrainian letters and culture between Olga Livshin, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Ali Kinsella.
Olga Livshin’s essays, poetry, and translations appear in Ploughshares, KR Online, Poetry International, and other journals. In 2019, her poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman appeared from Poets & Traitors Press. Livshin is an award-winning creative writing teacher for children online; find her at olgalivshin.com.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Robert Pinsky, and her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021. (Photo credit: Sharona Jacobs.)
Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian for ten years. Recently, she published Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Poetry by Natalka Bilotserkivets (Lost Horse Press, 2021) with Dzvinia Orlowsky. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Ali lived in Ukraine for nearly five years. She now lives in Chicago, where she also sometimes works as a baker.
Daniel Pritchard, Editor, February 24, 2022
Olga Livshin: I’d like to begin by chatting a bit about Ukrainian culture and the way in which it has shaped us as people and as translators.
Ukrainian culture has flown through my life like a creek among several waterways. I was born to a Jewish family in Odes(s)a; we moved to Moscow when I was in second grade, and emigrated to San Diego when I had just entered high school. Wherever my parents landed, they used a tapestry of language, mostly Russian, but studded with Ukrainian and Yiddish, and quotes from Mandelstam and Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. The quotational quality of what they said seemed to illustrate our sometimes-chaotic, often-delightful life. My mother and father chose from a few different–broad–vocabularies of languages and registers, coming up with the mot juste, the very most appropriate to explain the puzzling, disconcerting phenomenon in front of you. My dad, in particular, had an affinity to Ukrainian because he had written in Ukrainian as well as Russian for the city newspaper Вечерняя Одесса (Vecherniaia Odessa / The Nightly Odesa).
As a newcomer to the United States, when my father explained the world, he also found himself explaining the word, because I usually had no idea what he was saying. And time went backwards, to one of his original languages; and the long tape of immigrant years was being rewound… I started translating Ukrainian poets—Russian-speaking ones, because my own Ukrainian is weak—when my father became quite ill, and I was thinking about the inevitable eventuality of his passing…
Dzvinia, you and I are both children of immigrants who speak or spoke Ukrainian. In your translator’s note to Natalka Bilotserkivets’s book Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, you write that Bilotserkivets’s poems have resonated with you deeply for many years because the “movement between language and voice and requisite silence … echoes what [you] often felt growing up as a daughter of immigrant Ukrainian parents. Shifts between vivid, emotionally charged recollections … and long periods of silence in which a sense of alienation of solitude were keenly felt.” Bilotserkivets was born in 1954, and came of age during the late Soviet period. Of course, that is different from your background. Do you feel that your experience of translating Bilotserkivets has deepened your understanding of Ukrainian immigrant culture, or perhaps helped you reinterpret it in some way?
Dzvinia Orlowsky: Immersion in translating Natalka’s poems brought me closer to the Ukrainian language, thanks to Ali and her meticulous knowledge of it, than I had been in years. Thematically, they made me more aware of political and cultural shifts in the former Soviet Union—more specifically, in Ukraine in the 1980s and 1990s. However, in that sense, they didn’t really help inform me about what my parents and grandparents experienced in the 1930s and 40s. Rather, more importantly, her poems pulled me into a deeper understanding of how these events were processed and survived and the role poetry may have played in giving rise to a collective, defiant, cultural voice. As one example, Bilotserkivets’s acclaimed poem “May” about the 1986 Chornobyl disaster establishes its gravitas in personal, singular casualty and fear, rather than in global repercussions. Silence no longer solely exists as censorship’s accomplice, but rather it becomes a highly charged source from which voice is born.
The silence present in my home while my sister and I were growing up was instrumental in shaping a cultural identity that once it took hold, never released. Deeply embedded in our psyche was a prevailing sense of loss, of family gone missing or presumably dead and left unburied. My maternal grandmother spent hours walking circles in the living or dining room praying the rosary, and I, in turn, buried my Barbie dolls just outside my bedroom window. My parents never openly talked about the hardships or trauma they endured and survived. Or, for that matter, questioned why my dolls kept disappearing. Instead, they favored triumphant stories in which God, superstition, and the secure boundaries of ritual played key roles. They, too, curated a hybrid language incorporating Ukrainian, Polish, Austrian German, English, which, as they aged, left a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow to each story’s core. Looking back, I wish I had asked more questions, pushed for harder truths. However, I’m also grateful to those long stretches of silence as that is where my poetic imaginative work and contemplation took root.
Olga: Thank you so much. Ali, I am curious about what brought you to Ukrainian poetry: do you have roots in Ukraine, or has it been a different kind of journey? Where do you find yourself now that Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow is out in the world?
Ali Kinsella: Well, I am not a heritage or native Ukrainian speaker. I learned Ukrainian in my early twenties when I was sent to Ukraine as a Peace Corps volunteer. I lived in Brody, a small town in Western Ukraine, for three years and absolutely fell in love with the country, the people, and the language. I remember fairly early on in my training recognizing that I was forgetting Spanish as I learned more Ukrainian, and I made a conscious decision to sacrifice Spanish and give myself over fully to Ukrainian.
After I was back in the US, I was always looking for ways to remain connected to Ukraine, to the degree that I made myself a little enclave in New York and ended up speaking Ukrainian at home. A friend of mine there asked me to edit something he had translated and I decided to just try translating it myself. It was prose, as are most of my translations. I must admit that I don’t really read poetry on my own; I don’t feel fully at home in its idiom. I was drawn to this project because I knew and respected the series from Lost Horse Press and I felt sort of indignant that Natalka hadn’t yet been represented. I was so, so fortunate that the series editor, Grace Mahoney, suggested I get in touch with Dzvinia. I could never have done the work justice on my own—and no one would be eager to interview me! Working with Dzvinia has shown me that I can approach poetry and she’s given me so many tools to do so.
Now that EDHS is out in the world I am mostly working on longer fiction pieces, but Dzvinia and I have continued to collaborate on smaller poetry projects, and I have actually translated some poems on my own!
Olga, do you have any favorite Ukrainian words or expressions? Did your father?
OL: My Ukrainian isn’t great, but my dad was partial to what I see as a kind of languid longing in the vowels of Ukrainian. In his mouth, Ukrainian words appeared to me to be longer than Russian, more melodious; and the softer quality of consonants made it sound a bit cheeky, a bit lenient. I remember him stretching the taffy of кумедний—koo-MED-nyi—meaning “amusing,” or “zany.” My dad was a humor writer, among other things, and he did a lot of writing. Looking back, I think he preferred the fullness of that word; it captured something more for him.
Ali, I am so glad you took up poetry translation! This book is so beautifully rendered. To me, it resonates with the contemporary American tradition in its prosody, while retaining some important features of the Ukrainian originals. The emotionality in these translated poems is honest, raw, and often intense; you make no attempts to tame it. Moreover, while you switched out some of the original punctuation per the contemporary American poetic usage (Dzvinia, you are upfront about it in your translator’s note), the punctuation is often much more varied than what I associate with Anglo-American poetry of the past fifty years. Here, periods predominate; in contrast, your translations of Bilotserkivets’s poems contain many more exclamations and long dashes—those dramatic signs, those marks indicating we are about to fly from one mind-state to another within the poem… This makes the spectrum of feelings expansive, and full of nuances. The reader is given the permission to feel more, and feel more deeply. The Latinx writer Linda González once said to me that contemporary American society is emotionally illiterate. We have trouble understanding or discussing feelings. When I read Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, I feel a sense of release.
Dzvinia, you said that translating this book helped you appreciate how poetry may help us survive and understand catastrophic events. We are living through several such events now—the COVID pandemic, and Russian troops gathering at Ukraine’s border, with a possible invasion imminent. One thing that is puzzling, to me, is that with poetry—unlike with journalism or nonfiction about disasters such as Chornobyl—we do not get answers or certainty. In fact, “May” raises many rhetorical questions and speaks with urgency about its sorrow:
….Your lips
detect traces of an indistinct sipping:
Who drank from my cup?
Who’s flying in the distant night sky?
Another helicopter
hauling concrete and bromine?
O, you can grasp at your lifelines
all the way through eternity….
The helicopters hauling concrete and bromine—that is a reference to the early attempt to put out the fire number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The attempt did not work—and we never do get to find out what is criss-crossing the sky. But that, in my reading, is very much the point. So how does such poetry of rhetorical questions help us live through these chaotic and traumatizing days? Do you find that to be a paradox? Or does this poetry heal by acknowledging our collective bafflement?
DO: When I wrote that Natalka’s poems pulled me into a deeper understanding of how tragic events were processed and survived, I was referring specifically to Ukraine in the 1980s and 90s. I was aware of events through international news, but I lacked the deeper understanding that comes with reading/listening to the point of view of a singular human being who has witnessed the tragedy up close. Articulation and expression of despair varies from one individual to another; each carries its own emotional vocabulary. Natalka’s poetry, wild with contradictory associations often capturing a moment of persuasive contemplation, broadened mine.
“Elegy to a July Storm”
A storm! A storm!
How debilitating, how alarming.
How Cheerful! From outside the window
Air gusts in like a stream of light,
And a warm rain falls unavailingly
Above labyrinthine roots of turbulent rivers.
As you point out, unlike journalism or nonfiction, (though fake news/information disorder remains a problem) poetry often questions more than it answers. This is very true of Natalka’s poetry. However, I believe an answer is always somewhere within her poems, even if that answer is “I don’t know.” In general, I love poetry most that keeps calling me back. With each reading, new connections are made. This is also true of a collection of poetry. A book can be structured or read as one long poem incorporating many twists and unexpected turns, moving (movement is breath) from intimate to panoramic and back, though not necessarily in that order. I agree, Olga, in those stunning lines you excerpt from “May” that we never find out what exactly crisscrosses the sky. Perhaps, as one interpretation, flying in the distant night sky in “a last attempt to fly off somewhere” … (are) … “the solitary flights of our lives.” (Swallows)
Trauma renders silence as does suffering without purpose. Questioning is one way to alleviate that suffering because it breaks the silence, even if the result is disorientation. In a sense, every poet is a translator rewriting experience where literal details of traumatic experience may be replaced by objects through images into metaphor. In her poem “Knife,” Natalka uses an object as a poignant symbol for death, martyrdom, or perhaps liberation. What specifically is she talking about? That’s up for interpretation, and I’m grateful for the invitation. It’s a poem I keep going back to.
“KNIFE”
A knife
to slice bread.
A knife—to carve a whistle.
A knife,
to finish killing the lamb
wounded by the wolf.
So
naked, dry, and lean
the cleaned surface of fish
foams with sweat
in Sabbath-day broth—
a sign of mercy and tears.
Don’t
touch it without a
Blessing:
this knife
is music that kills.
These aren’t just words—
they’re poetry
without
Words
where grass washes
heaven’s blade.
Ali: I don’t mean to diminish the trauma we are living through, but my experience over the last year was one of becoming a mother, which is a trauma of a different type, a much more personal type. Of course, this is overlaid on years now of intentionally isolating ourselves, adding to the isolation of new parenthood. For some reason, I have lately been questioning what I see as a very masculine type of surety, this belief that things will and can be better if not ideal. It’s not self-confidence, per se, but more like eternal optimism or a sincere belief in the rightness of the world, a rightness that is very much conditioned by one’s station. I can’t know for certain that this irritation is directly related to motherhood (though it seems like everything is), but I do think my new reality has revealed it to me. I actually see a lot of this surety in my younger self, whereas now I feel less inclined to look for a solution and more comfortable just accepting whatever awful situation I find myself in. But this acceptance comes about collectively. And here, again, it’s hard to know if I’m reading these feminist themes in Natalka’s poetry or into it, but maybe I don’t really care.
In “Elegy to a July Storm” she asks, “Will my tears protect you / on this border between being / and nonbeing?” She does not know, cannot know, in fact, but she seems to accept this state of worry and trepidation. Even the word “nonbeing” strikes me as a clue to her mental state; it resonates with not knowing and not being able. These sentiments happen to be maternal (though hardly exclusively), but she does it again in “Wine of the Lonely” when talking about two friends or lovers.
They breathed each other’s breath,
but knew nothing of one another—
unable to find the distance
to know.
Whether it’s inherently gendered or not, the confusion and disorientation that Natalka is so comfortable with feels reassuring. As turned off as I am by the jargon of our day—“holding space”—there’s something in having others present to offer solace and telling us it’s okay not to know.
Olga: I relate to that, Ali. I have a ten-year-old son. The birth and early years of one’s children’s life was going to be hell—so said a friend of mine, a writer and (at the time) academic, when I was pregnant. I did not believe her; but it was.
Dzvinia: I can identify with the points you and Ali raise, though I became a mother at a later age—38 and 40. What does “hell” mean to you in relation to motherhood?
Olga: Here, I actually find Bilotserkivets in your translation insightful. In Bilotserkivets’s poems, one stands, a preteen girl with tiny breasts, and yet one is then, suddenly, a participant in history, as the nuclear reactor blows up near Pripyat; or one witnesses a summer storm, then it is, suddenly, time to nurse a child. It’s a juxtaposition, not a smooth blend. It’s sudden. Motherhood, to me, was raucous and utterly overwhelming at first. It’s a vulnerable moment. And here in the United States we do not have paid maternity leave–so, in my case, I had to go back to work four weeks after my son was born, despite a difficult labor with some consequences. So, me-as-a-mother could barely exist when it had to coexist with me-as-an-employee. There was certainly not enough room for me-as-a-poet.
Things are better now, since I have rearranged my life. But, to Ali’s point about poetry that settles you into being comfortable with not knowing: that is so very true in the moment, while going through a deeply transformative and possibly traumatizing experience. Yes, there is poetry for that too; in her recent chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, Katie Farris writes about a different kind of harrowing experience for the body and the mind—breast cancer—and she speaks of the necessity to find, “in the middle of hell / what isn’t hell.” That is an admirable challenge. That said, with certain kinds of hell—in the moment of childbearing, for example, or of early motherhood—things are dark, and we are nearsighted. So perhaps Bilotserkivets offers a different way of coping with trauma: to accept that silence and darkness. Maybe there is a kind of equanimity to it. Not forcing oneself to work on it, as certain American professional cultures of high achievement demand from us we do with everything, from motherhood to professional work. Just letting go.
Dzvinia: When my son, Max, was ten and my daughter, Raisa, eight, I was also diagnosed with breast cancer. How to negotiate the archetypal Great Mother with the underweight, bald woman who stared back at me in the mirror? How blessed I was not only to have my family but my writer/poetry friends rally around me. During that year of surgery and chemotherapy, they kept me engaged in conversations and correspondence about survivorship, trauma, and transformation, pushing me toward that blank page where through my own will and words anything felt possible again. It was a reaffirmation of life.
Olga: What a transformation. I am so glad your family and community were there for you, and so was the page. Congratulations on being a cancer survivor!
Dzvinia: A well-known proverb states “It takes a village to raise a child.” I believe it takes a village of voices to raise a single authentic voice. Olga, in your inaugural, stunning poetry collection, A Life Replaced, you include a hybrid of voices, including not only your own poems, but your translations of work by Anna Akhmatova and contemporary Russian-Jewish poet Vladimir Gandelsman. How did you come to choose those poets as those with whom, as Ilya Kaminsky states in the foreword, to “tango and transform”?
Olga: I am drawn to Vladimir’s work as a fellow immigrant. He is an ex-Leningrader, currently living near New York, and he is just such a master of certain common immigrant experiences. He writes about being seen as the bad or dangerous “other” due to one’s accent or appearance or not-as-yet-typical ability to manage everyday tasks when one is newly arrived in the US. In the Trump times, it was an especially important project for me: to make sure that we are heard, including those of us who write in other languages. So I translated his work, and I improvised some of my own about similar experiences.
As for Akhmatova, I had been drawn to her as a queer Russian woman who wrote about her friend and likely lover in Russian, in a totally different time and place. In 2016, I also found myself as a former resident of the USSR who had left that country due to a long history of persecution, and now living with a president who goaded on crowds chanting hateful slogans and perpetrating violence in synagogues. I was grasping for some way to bridge these two worlds. So Akhmatova, who had lived through Stalin’s time, was a source of lyrical wisdom to me. She had stood in lines to hear anything at all about her son after he had been imprisoned—stood outside, for hours, in Leningrad winter weather—and wrote about bearing witness to that situation. She advocated for her friends in that very dangerous time. I translated Akhmatova and wrote my poems in English, in dialogue with her.
Dzvinia: Turning back to your original question, how do you see creatively engaging your voice with Akhmatova and Gandelsman as a way of processing and surviving traumatic events?
Olga: I will focus on Akhmatova in my response. I did not want to do another translation of “Requiem,” because, truthfully, there are several good ones out there. I translated “Poem without a Hero,” which is about the ghostly presences of the friends and loved ones she had lost to emigration or death at the hands of the Soviet state. The lost ones speak to Akhmatova from beyond their graves and/or geographical barriers. But all she can do is listen; they cannot hear her. While translating, I realized that instead of some sort of poetic manual on survival, this was going to be a salve on my wounds. What Ali says about Bilotserkivets resonates with me about Akhmatova: both poets acknowledge what is, including our losses. This demands a certain kind of surrender from the author. It invites the reader to surrender, too. Even in many earlier poems Akhmatova wrote—about World War I, and the Russian Revolution—she keeps articulating the idea that her life has been “replaced”: that due to a whole host of historical events, some other woman is living the life she was meant to have. I found a connection to these poems of an odd parallel life, so much so that I wrote my own companion poems to her, finding parallels between her situation and ours. The myth of America that I had wanted to inhabit as a teen, when we came here, turned out to be only an image in my head. It has been replaced by the reality that certain attitudes have been there all along–and now they surfaced. Letting go of that myth enables us to be aware of the complexity of this country of ours, and of its history, and perhaps to make better connections with each other. Maybe to heal.
Dzvinia: To quote psychotherapist and brilliant poet/writer, Melanie Drane, “Perhaps grief, because it makes clear the value of what might be lost, is one of the essential experiences that carries us, like music, toward meaning.” I appreciate your thoughtful questions, Olga, and the opportunity to have this conversation with you and Ali.
Olga: Thank you both so much. This was really meaningful.
Ali: What a pleasure getting to chew on some important, quiet ideas with two keen minds! Thank you for “holding the space.”
