“There isn’t merely a documentary voice in these pages, and not merely a shout of just outrage, but also a strangeness, and even wonder at the horror that’s history. And so my gratitude to Christopher Merrill is genuine for this attentive, and necessary work.”
On the Road to Lviv
by Christopher Merrill
tr. by Nina Murray
Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. “This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday,“ writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem’s speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a “democratic- minded” Westerner “determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world.” Not since Byron’s Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray’s masterly translation into Ukrainian.
“At times deeply personal, and at others, more detached, this book-length poem serves as both elegy and eulogy for a country that has only rarely been peaceful, and certainly not since the advent of the 20th century and the two World Wars that redefined both political relationships and nations in Europe. Merrill’s poet-speaker provides the reader with necessary history and geography lessons that aid in the understanding of both the text and the ongoing conflict. This becomes the framework upon which the central questions about human dignity and cultural identity are hung.”
~Carlene Gadapee, MicroLit
Christopher Merrill
Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self- Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries, and he served as a Senior Fulbright Specialist in Poland and Russia. He also served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Translator:
Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collections Glapthorn Circular (LiveCanon Poetry, 2023) and Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) as well as several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (Deep Vellum, 2023). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022, and toured to Cambridge and Oxford in 2023. Nina grew up in Lviv and lives, for the moment, in Cambridgeshire, England.
