Victoria Amelina, "Not Poetry," translated

...as if language was struck by a missile...

Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist. Having founded the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region, her team has in 2022 launched the "Fight Them with Poetry" initiative to help supply the Ukrainian Army units defending that region. An author of two novels, a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel Дім для Дома [Dom's Dream Kingdom], she was at work on a non-fiction project, "War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War" when  a Russian missile killed her in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023.

 
Вікторія Амеліна

 

Не поезія

Я не пишу поезію
Я прозаїк
Просто реальність війни
з'їдає пунктуацію
зв'язність сюжету
зв'язність
з'їдає
Наче у мову
влучив снаряд

Уламки мови
схожі на поезію
але це не вона

І це теж не вона
Вона в Харкові
Волонтерить

09 травня 2022

Wiktorija Amelina

Niepoezja

Nie piszę poezji
Jestem prozaiczką
Po prostu rzeczywistość wojny
pożera interpunkcję
spójność fabuły
spójność
pożera
Jakby w język
trafił pocisk

Odłamki języka
przypominają poezję
ale to nie ona

I to też nie ona
Ona jest w Charkowie
jako wolontariuszka


9 maja 2022

Translated from the Ukrainian to the Polish by Aneta Kamińska

 

Victoria Amelina

Not Poetry

I don't write poetry
I'm a prose writer
It's just that the reality of war
devours punctuation
unity of plot
devours
unity
as if language
was struck by a missile

Shards of language
look like poetry
but this isn’t her

And this isn’t her either
She’s in Kharkiv
as a volunteer

 

9 May 2022

Krystyna Dąbrowska’s English translation is from Aneta Kamińska's  Polish.

 

 

 

Aneta Kamińska is a poet, performer, scholar, and long-standing promoter and translator of Ukrainian poetry into Polish. She lives in Warsaw.

An alum of IWP, poet and translator Krystyna Dąbrowska lives in Warsaw. Her poetry has most recently appeared in English in the 2022 volume Tideline (Zephyr Press). 

B.Bircher_blue abstraction

91st M 2023 vol 12 no 1

Editorial

Juan Rulfo, "The Fields on Fire"; translated from the Spanish by John White

Florence Sunnen, “Bone Sharks/Ossicles”

Ao О̄mae, "Shark Friends";  translated from the Japanese by Emily Balistrieri

Kyoko Yoshida, "The First Kyoto Writers' Residency." Translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor

"Drawing Words from a Well: Antonio Gamoneda’s Castilian Blues": a review essay by Sara Gilmore

                                                                                   

Victoria Amelina, "Не поезія"/ "Niepoezja"/ "Not Poetry"; translated from the Ukrainian by Aneta Kamińska and from the Polish by Krystyna Dąbrowska

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