The Voices of Babyn Yar
Marianna Kiyanovska author Oksana Maksymchuk translator Max Rosochinsky translator Polina Barskova editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Published:30th Sep '22
Should be back in stock very soon
“[A]n extraordinary work within the literary canon of the Holocaust.” —Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work
With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.
There is no doubt that The Voices of Babyn Yar is destined to become a classic text in the Ukrainian canon. Will this poetry save nations or people? Of course not. But it will forever serve as a reminder of the human capacity for evil—a prompt we seem to require on a regular basis. -- Askold Melnyczuk * Times Literary Supplement *
Kiyanovska has collected the imaginary testimony of individuals entwined in these unspeakable atrocities. Now they speak…Paradoxically, because the poems are presented as poetic communications, permeated with interjections from the poet herself, they do not further rend the fabric of reality, but have an utter authenticity that can only be explained by vision. -- Matthew Zapruder * Orion *
In a translation that nudges close to the linguistic breaking points of the original, while retaining the fullness of its poetic registers and plethora of references to Ukrainian, Jewish, Soviet, and Western contexts, the seasoned translators-cum-poets Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky draw attention to an extraordinary work within the literary canon of the Holocaust. -- MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work
In 2017, the poet Marianna Kiyanovska published her collection Babyn Yar: Holosamy. It has now been translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rozochinsky in a virtuosic English version…[The] poems include a discussion of the Nazi genocide, Soviet revisionist history, and recent conversations about identity and citizenship. -- Amelia Glaser * Jewish Renaissance *
- Winner of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work 2023 (United States)
- Winner of Peterson Literary Fund Translated Book Award 2023 (United States)
- Short-listed for AATSEEL Best Translation into English Book Prize 2023 (United States)
ISBN: 9780674268760
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
192 pages