PEN-UPenn "Your Language My Ear" Ukrainian Poetry in Translation Readings

A reading of contemporary Ukrainian poetry read in the original language, followed by English translations read by the translators and others. This event benefits Ukrainian poets in a time of need and extremity.

The event will include:

Ostap Slyvynsky, translations read by Vitaly Chernetsky (additional translations by Iryna Shuvalova)

Boris Khersonsky, translations read by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, and Martha Kelly

Lyudmila Khersonskaya, translations read by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco 

Anna Gruver, translations read by Kevin M. F. Platt (translations by Anand Dibble)

Lesyk Panasiuk, translations read by Alex Averbuch

Iya Kiva, translations read by Amelia Glaser, Yuliya Ilchuk, and Katherine E. Young

Oleh Bohun, translations read by Eugene Ostashevsky (translated with Ostap Kin)

This is the first in a series of events sponsored by: PEN America: Kelly Writers House and the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and the non-profit organization Poets in Need.

Author and translator bios: 

Alex Averbuch, a native of Novoaidar, Luhans’k region, Ukraine (b. 1985), is a literary historian, bilingual (Ukrainian/Russian) poet, and translator. He is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, and English. His poetry deals with the issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory. He has organized numerous poetic performances and festivals, most recently, the International Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry in summer 2020. He has also edited a special issue of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations dedicated to the festival participants’ poetry. Averbuch specializes in Ukrainian, Russian, and Hebrew literatures; commodity culture; gender and critical race theory; the European Enlightenment; transnational cultures; translation; and using creative writing in foreign language pedagogy. He earned his PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on the history of the genre of solicitory poetry in Ukrainian, Russian, and Hebrew. Currently he is the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta with a project titled “The Womanly Face of War: Narratives of Resistance and Exile in the Confiscated Correspondence of Soviet Female Ostarbeiters in Nazi Germany.” 

Oleh Bohun (b. 1995 in Khmel’nyts’kyi, Ukraine) is a poet and translator. Since 2012 he has lived and worked in Lviv. He is currently working on a PhD in Philosophy at Ivan Franko National University. He has published poems in the Ukrainian journals SHO, Lystok, Kontekst, and others, as well as via the online platforms Litcentr and Soloneba. His poetry has also appeared in Polish in Helikopter and Obszary Przepisane, in Russian in Vozdukh, Poetica, and in German translations, as well. Bohun has curated and participated in numerous poetry events at literary festivals in Ukraine, including Book Forum Lviv, Book Arsenal, Kyiv Poetry Week, and others. His first book of poems Темносприйнята частка (Kharkiv: kntxt,  2021), was included in the shortlist of best poetry books of 2021 by PEN Ukraine.

Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has been translating poetry and prose into English since the mid-1990s. He co-edited the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000) a bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Letters from Ukraine (2016). His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (2018, with Ostap Kin), a book by the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze, Zhdanovka (2006), and two children’s books by Romana Romanyshyn and Adriy Lesiv, Sound (2020) and Sight (2021).

Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she also holds an endowed chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern UP, 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford UP, 2015), and the co-editor, with Steven Lee, of Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel-Yiddish Poets (U. Wisconsin Press, 2005). Her translations, from Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish, have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. She is currently the Rita E. Hauser fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she is at work on a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry and community. She is also curating a series on recent poetry from Ukraine, which she has co-translated with Yuliya Ilchuk, for LitHub.com.

Anna Gruver, a Ukrainian poet and essayist, was born in 1996 in Donetsk. She is the author of the 2019 book of poems За вашим запитом нічого не знайдено (Nothing was found at your request). Her poems have been translated into English, Polish, Hebrew, Romanian, Lithuanian and Russian and have been published in particular in the journals Sho, F-letter, in the media sites Litcentr, Soloneba, and in other fora. Gruver translates essays and contemporary poetry from Ukrainian into Polish and vice versa. In 2019, Anna received third prize in the prestigious “Smoloskyp” literary competition for young writers. She was co-editor of the bilingual poetry journal Paradigma (2019-2021). Gruver also published interviews with famous Ukrainian writers, including Lyuba Yakymchuk, Iryna Shuvalova, Ostap Slyvynsky, and Oksana Lutsyshyna. She is studying Hebrew Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Before the 2022 war, Anna lived in Kharkiv and Kyiv. She remains at present in Ukraine.

Yuliya Ilchuk is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. Her major research interests fall under the broad heading of cultural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid by situating them in the in-between space of Russian and Ukrainian cultures. Ilchuk's most recent book project, tentatively titled “Future in the Past: Memory, Culture, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine,” offers a comparative analysis of the memory culture in Russia and Ukraine through their rivalry over the control and dissemination of memory of the Soviet past and recent present. 

Ostap Kin has edited the anthologies Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (also co-translated with John Hennessy; forthcoming from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute) and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. He is the co-translator, with John Hennessy, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, which co-won the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Kin also co-translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, a volume of selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych titled Songs for a Dead Rooster.

Andrew Janco holds a PhD in history, and is a co-director of an NEH-funded institute designed to build linguistic diversity in the digital humanities. With Olga Livshin, Andrew has translated a number of Russian and Ukrainian poets. Their translations appear in Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, Words for War: New Poetry from Ukraine, and numerous journals. He works as a digital scholarship programmer at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Martha M. F. Kelly is an associate professor of Russian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Missouri. She is the author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetics and co-editor, with Sibelan Forrester, of Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts. Her translations and essays have appeared in Two Lines, LARB Short Takes, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily and Lit Hub. She is currently working on a book entitled “How to Be a Russian Icon: The Post-Soviet Public Life of Poet Olga Sedakova” and is translating a volume of Sedakova’s poems.

Boris Khersonsky is one of Ukraine’s most prominent writers and the recipient of national and international awards. While much of his work is in Russian, in recent years he has published increasingly in Ukrainian. Khersonsky lives in Odessa, where he chairs the department of clinical psychology at Odessa National University. During the Soviet period he played an important role in Underground culture and was published throughout the Soviet Union in samizdat (unofficial, “self-published” works distributed through networks of acquaintances). 

Lyudmyla Khersonskaya is the author of four books of poetry.  A Russophone poet, she has spoken about Russia’s war in Ukraine and read her poetry about the war many times on Radio Liberty and in other venues. Her poems have been translated into Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and German, and she has held poetry readings in Moscow, Kyiv, Lviv, Munich, and New York. Her latest book, To Step Over The Ditch (Перешагнуть ров), includes poetic reflections on Russian aggression in Ukraine. Khersonska lives in Odesa.  Khersonska translates English-language poets into Russian, including Vladimir Nabokov and Seamus Heaney. 

Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist. She was born in 1984 in Donetsk, but because of the Russian-Ukrainian war she has lived in Kyiv since the summer of 2014. From March of 2022 she has lived in Lviv. Kiva writes in both Russian and Ukrainian. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Podal’she ot raya [Farther from Heaven] (2018) and Persha storinka zimi [The First Page of Winter] (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarusian writers, My prokinemos’ inshimi: rozmovi z suchasnymi belosurs’kimi pis’mennikami pro minule, teperishne I maybutne Bilorusi [We will awaken as others: discussions with contemporary Belarus authors about the past, the present, and the future of Belarus] (2021). Kiva is a member of the PEN Club of Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages. She is a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poets into Russian, she also translates Belarusian and Polish poetry and essays into both Ukrainian and Russian. She contributes to the program PJ Library as editor and translator of children’s books from English to Ukrainian. Kiva has received various international and Ukrainian awards and has participated in a variety of festivals and competitions, including the International Poetry Festival Emigrantskaya Lyra (2016), the International Poetry Competition Gayvoronniya (2019), the Yuriy Kaplan Literary Award (2013), award of the Literary Competition of the Smoloskyp Publishing House (2018), the Metaphora Translator’s Award (2020). She was the winner of the II Poetry Tournament and recipient of the Nestor Letopisets Award (2019). In 2019, she received a special award from LitAktsent for her collection Persha storinka zimi. Kiva is the recipient of a Gaude Polonia fellowship from the Ministry of Culture of Poland (2021) and participant of the Nest Writer’s Residency (2022) in the Vitachiv village of the Kyiv region. 

Olga Livshin was raised in Odesa and Moscow, and came to San Diego as a Jewish refugee with her parents. Her poetry and translations appear in Ploughshares, AGNI Online, the Kenyon Review Online, and Modern Poetry in Translation, among other journals, as well as anthologies including Words for War: New Poetry from Ukraine. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. Livshin holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures and taught Russian language and culture at the university level for a decade. She currently teaches children seven and up creative writing and international literature online from her studio, Livshin Literary. 

Eugene Ostashevsky’s most recent translation is Lucky Breaks by the Ukrainian fiction writer Yevgenia Belorusets, released by New Directions. His next book of poetry is The Feeling Sonnets, forthcoming in the fall of 2022

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, designer and performance artist. Panasiuk is the author of three books of poetry in Ukrainian, books of poetry in translation into Romanian and Russian, and individual works translated into 16 languages. Panasiuk is translator and co-translator of books by Valzhyna Mort, Siarhei Prylutski, Dmitry Kuzmin, Artem Werle and of three anthologies of Belarusian literature. Panasiuk has been laureate of various literary contests, recipient of the President of Ukraine stipend for writers (2019) and participant in international residences for writers and translators in Latvia (Ventspils, 2019) and Poland (Warsaw, 2021).

Iryna Shuvalova is a poet, translator, and scholar. She holds an MA degree in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she examined the Russo-Ukrainian war through the prism of popular culture. She published five award-winning collections of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells (2019) available in English from Lost Horse Press in the US. Her latest collection stoneorchardwoods (kaminsadlis, 2020) has been named poetry book of the year in Ukraine by Litakcent book awards and won the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award of 2021. She is a member of PEN Ukraine. She now lives and works between Kyiv, Ukraine, and Nanjing, China.

Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic. He is author of five books of poetry. His poetry collections have been published in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia. He translates fiction and non-fiction from Polish, English, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belarusian and Russian into Ukrainian. Among the authors that he has translated are Derek Walcott, James Tate, William Carlos Williams, Charles Simic, Czesław Miłosz, Hanna Krall, Andrzej Stasiuk, Olga Tokarczuk, Mikołaj Łoziński, Ignacy Karpowicz, and Georgi Gospodinov. Slyvynsky’s poetry and translations have been recognized with the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020), the Hubert Burda Poetry Prize (2009), the Kovaliv Fund Prize (2013), the Polish Embassy’s translation prize (2007), and the Medal for Merit to Polish Culture (2014). Ostap Slyvynsky was the first program director of the International Literary Festival in Lviv in 2006–2007 and still organizes many literary festivals and events in Ukraine. In 2015, he collaborated with the composer Bohdan Sehin on the media performance, “Preparation,” dedicated to civilian victims of war in the East of Ukraine. Slyvynsky teaches Polish literature at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv as well as contemporary literatures of East Central Europe and courses on translation at Ukrainian Catholic University. He is often a guest lecturer at Polish and Western European universities. Ostap Slyvynsky lives in Lviv.

Katherine E. Young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards and the editor of Written in Arlington. She is the award-winning translator of work by Anna Starobinets (memoir), Akram Aylisli (fiction), and numerous Russophone poets. Young was named a 2017 NEA translation fellow; from 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.