“ Read these poems of Lyudmyla Khersonska and hear the voice of a woman awake and alive in Ukraine under Russian bombardment. Here is a poet so in love with the living world that her love enables her to describe its destruction. You want the news? Listen to her voice and feel the abstractions crack and break open in the wake of her witness.”
Today is a Different War
by Lyudmyla Khersonska
tr. by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman
Lyudmyla Khersonska’s striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine shows us images that will sear themselves in your memory. 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.
“Globally, Ukrainian poets are establishing Ukrainian poetry as a decolonization mechanism within a global literature canon traditionally dominated by Russian literature. In turn, these poets establish poetry as means of preservation for documenting the daily challenges and brutality of life during wartime. In Lyudmyla Khersonska’s Today Is a Different War, readers encounter a speaker attuned to and in love with the living world and able to document the war’s destruction because of their connection with their surroundings.”
-Nicole Yurcaba, World Literature Today
Lyudmyla Khersonska
Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. In 2022 her joint volume with the poet Boris Khersonsky, her husband, came out in English translation from Lost Horse Press, titled The Country where Everyone’s Name is Fear. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders.
Translators:
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).
