Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet, translated from the Ukrainian by poet Olena Jennings is a poetry collection where worldbuilding is made in the distance between the speaker and her loved ones, through memory before and after the War, geographical expanse between Ukraine and the West, and the idealism and stark realities as “Only letters/ gnaw at memory/ like mice gnaw at last year’s feed sack... / Short poems come with the freedom for the blind. / Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.” In this way, the collection bears witness to “The many-karat silence” as the poet learns to “speak again/ after they tore [her] language out of [her] / letter by letter” and “bulletproof books” become tangible objects to literally “cover the windows” as “those forthcoming will preserve our borders.”
Tiffany Troy: What is the act of literary translation to you?
Olena Jennings: First of all, it is an intimate act, one of connection with the author. Then, it is an inspired act. It starts with a draft then proceeds to editing. It is creative in that images can be interpreted in different ways. Just as when reading a poem in my native language, I bring my own interpretations to the poem.
Literary translation is also a political act. It brings the Ukrainian culture to the English-speaking world. The Ukrainian language has been persecuted by the Russian Empire and during the Soviet Union. This began in 1876 with the Ems decree, banning the use of the Ukrainian language. Then, in the late 1920s, about 223 writers were arrested and many executed, becoming the Executed Renaissance. Currently, we have our own Executed Renaissance with writers such as Victoria Amelina and Maksym Kryvtsov killed as a consequence of the full-scale Russian invasion. Because of this, it is important to let the Ukrainian culture flourish through translation.
TT: What you said reminds me of Malihon’s lines: “The hardest thing is learning to speak again/ after they tore your language out of you/ letter by letter.../ And here you are with a mouth full of red silence/ before hundreds of the world’s microphones/ but everyone hears you/ this is after all new poetry.” In your translator’s note, you speak of how in 2016, you translated Burnt Skin, Anna Malihon’s chapbook. Could you describe your translation process? As a prolific translator from the Ukrainian, and in approaching the act of translation as a political act in homage to a culture that you love, what first drew you to Malihon’s poems?
OJ: I was unfamiliar with Malihon’s work until Taras Malkovych, a Ukrainian poet, and Underground Books, the publisher of our chapbook, introduced me to it. The translation had to be done very quickly to make it in time for the New York City Poetry Festival and so seemed more like a draft. I did a lot of revisions before they became part of Girl with a Bullet.
I grew up speaking Ukrainian and learned the love for the culture from my Ukrainian grandparents who were refugees after World War II. I continued to read Ukrainian literature, especially during my studies at Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute and University of Alberta.
My translation process begins with a draft that is inspired by the way I connect with the poems. Certain images might have resonated with events in my own life that are no longer relevant when I start the second draft. In the second draft, I hone in on what the author intended. It’s a process of discovery and reflection.
When I first began translating Malihon’s poems in 2016, when Russia had already invaded Ukraine in 2014, her poems were still fairly playful. Since she has become a refugee, they have become more dark and significant.
TT: (How) did your approach towards translation change, as Malihon shifted from her early tight rhymed poetry to free verse when the Russian invasion rendered her a refugee?
OJ: I usually don’t translate the end rhyme, instead focusing on other aspects of poetry from internal rhyme to assonance, so my process didn’t change much. It was more my attitude towards the poems, as they became less about their play with the connection between vivid images than about portraying the new weight of the images.
TT: Yes, and what is so beautiful/ defiant about Mailhon’s poetry is how, she defies metamorphosing people as country, in writing: “They say that countries are like people./ The chosen ones/ have a heavy cross to bear./ I don’t believe it.”
What most draws you to Malihon’s poetry, which speaks of how at the same time of this “unbroken shared eternal dorm” the “agate moon reveals/ [t]he cemetery of possibilities”?
OJ: What draws me most to Anna’s poetry is the way that horrific images are woven with images of beauty. They are like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. This is true in the first poem that I translated, “A Tale of Burnt Skin.” For example, “and bright sweet strawberries grow among corpses spilling a sweet smell.” The sweet strawberries ring red, a common color in Anna’s work, spilling like blood.
TT: Most poems in Girl With a Bullet are untitled (or take their title from the first line of the poems). There are shorter as well as longer poems. Malihon writes, “Short poems come with freedom for the blind./ Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.” So I’m wondering, what was the process in working with Malihon to sequence the collection?
OJ: Most of the poems are untitled and most are long. We both were flexible with the sequence, but we decided to put the poems from the chapbook Burnt Skin at the end and to end with the poem, “Daughter, this is our land,” which was written even before the war in the Donbas region started. We thought it a poignant and positive way to end the book.
TT: What was one challenge (or lesson learned) in translating these poems from Ukrainian to English?
OJ: Every work I translate into English teaches me a new lesson. This translation taught me that each person can have a different interpretation of the poem. Even the writer and translator can have different interpretations. This is especially seen in the poem “Unfold and dive into me.” The disparate images seemed unconnected until I decided they were all tied to the poem’s narrator playing a game. Overall, connecting disparate images in Malihon’s poems so that they flowed was a challenge. Yet, this is one of my favorite aspects of Malihon’s poems, so it was a lot of fun.
TT: What are you working on today?
OJ: I’m working on my own collection of poetry, tentatively titled The Memory of Maps. It includes poems about my mother’s family and Ukrainian culture and about my father, as he grew up in the wake of his own father’s tragic death. I need to distance myself from translation to dive into these poems.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
OJ: I hope readers come away with the sparkling jewels of beauty found in Malihon’s work, carrying the images with them. I hope they will hold Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and sovereignty in their hearts.
Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press), the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press). She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, and Vasyl Makhno. Her translation of Yuliya Musakovska’s The God of Freedom was released in 2024 from Arrowsmith Press. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.