Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin is a co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry (New Meridian Arts Books, 2022).
Andrew Janco’s translations are published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and other journals, and are included in the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. With Olga Livshin, he is the co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry. Andrew works as a digital scholarship programmer at the University of Pennsylvania libraries.
Maya Chhabra’s translations have appeared in The White Review, Cardinal Points, and Poetry Travels. She is the author of a novel in verse, Chiara in the Dark, and several other children’s books including Stranger on the Home Front. Her short stories and original poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, PodCastle, and various anthologies.
Lev Fridman is a speech-language pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writing, translations and reviews have appeared in various publications. He is co-editor of “Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul”: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020).
“In the morning, rockets outside the windows/ instead of birds,’ writes Lyudmyla Khersonska in Today is a Different War, her striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Her images will sear themselves in your memory: “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in....”
The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented: “I don’t know how to live now./ where, in what direction, for example/ you and I don’t have a bomb shelter, not even a basement,” to the combustible and combative: “Russian invader..../ Fear female revenge and female conspiracy,/ Fear Ukrainian girls, Molotov cocktails in hand....”
Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what’s in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.”