“Ukrainian book readers are some sort of a caste”: An Interview with Yuri Andrukhovych

by Kateryna Kalytko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Gordynchuk

The icon rode in the wagon with him amid sacks full of last year’s potatoes. This grim man in a clunker with a wagon has been Osyp's only chance for a ride on the way there, but at least he was able to stretch his legs out. The potatoes were sprouting; he could even hear their shoots moving in the sacks. The fabric in which the icon was wrapped, slid down a little, revealing a corner of a colorful canvas, and a stray bee, woken by an early warm spell, tried to land on it. Osyp saw this as a good sign and didn’t even worry that the bee would inevitably die once it got colder again.

by Kateryna Khinkulova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Gordynchuk

I did not bury Tanya – I scattered her ashes in Paris. All this romantic appeal – dying somewhere but not in Paris, bridges over the Seine, whatever – really got under my skin. I stood on one of the bridges, Bolik sleeping in his stroller. It wasn’t the Mirabeau Bridge, but I could see the Eiffel Tower and the Musee d’Orsay from it anyway. I didn’t have enough courage to do this during the day, so we came late at night when it got completely dark.

by Sophie Gertrude Strohmeier

A brief encounter in Brussels at Christmas, then the flight eastwards: a housewife and a shopgirl caught up in an amour fou that will lose itself, unresolved, in a criss crossing of limbs and European landscapes, finally coming to a standstill in Trieste, along the Slovenian border. At the edge of the Western world, one burning question: where do lovers go when all has been escaped from?

by Alisa Ganieva
Translated from the Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The three law enforcement men had already been clicking around the parquet of the downstairs rooms for quite a while, two citizens deputized to witness the search trudging along behind them, gaping at the fancy décor of the Lyamzin house.

by Oleksiy Chupa
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

These days no one would even remember who Gerhardt Frei was. Yet, some sixty-odd years ago, this name ended up at the center of most kitchen table conversations throughout the city. After the final rout of the Third Reich, he, along with thousands of other German POWs, was sent here, to our part of Eastern Ukraine, for construction work. Frei was taken prisoner all the way out in the suburbs of Berlin.

by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The story I’m about to tell could’ve only happened at Christmas time. It has all the traditional elements of a Christmas story: the Magi, the messengers, the angels singing in a pomegranate-red December sky, and a sense of mystery living inside every one of us. If you listen carefully, this story will, if anything, seem to imply that mystery in its pristine form always exists somewhere around us. All you have to do is stop acting like you’re above it all and try to feel its presence. 

by Andriy Lyubka
Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

From the outside, his building looked absolutely ordinary. The old, two-story stone structure had been divided into four apartments. His was on the first floor of the right wing. The neighbors didn’t exactly know what he did all day. Perhaps they noticed that he only left the building on rare occasions and almost never in the morning, which meant he didn’t work or worked from home. 

by Tanja Maljartschuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

A certain man lived up to age 33 in peace and harmony. He had a job, he had a family, he had relatives and acquaintances. He had two good friends with whom he met up once a month. Together they would put back four mugs of beer each, they’d talk over their jobs, families, relatives and acquaintances, then would part ways, happy and tipsy, to their respective homes to sleep. 

by Kateryna Babkina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv

I bought those photographs – the entire album – for 70 euros at Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels. Roma always said I didn’t know the value of money, and he was probably right. I don’t like flea markets; I prefer new, nice stuff. Roma’s the complete opposite, though.

by Isabel Anreus

Eddy’s beat-up Converses are resting against the wheel of the car and his eyes are staring at the worn interior vinyl ceiling. The time on the dashboard reads 12:15 pm. He’s late, typical. The old priest wanted Eddy to pick him up at 12:00 pm sharp.

by Billie Hanne

When we are touched we are moved. Silence emerges, blooms, but, as in Nature so in us, silence can only last for a second. Then we have to speak, do, move. And thus we make, create, take action to be with, to participate in, yet to not disturb the vision that we are presented with. We do what we can to hold onto and deepen our experience of the moment that grasps our attention. We open our heart as wide as we can to receive its mystic content. We bare what we are able to. One person only a bit stronger than the next.

by Evan Steuber

Look in the mirror and see how your eyes will frame age and time. Death is the most obvious beginning. We dress up a corpse to convince ourselves this is a person. Still, if the corpse can be forgotten, death is also the easiest way to avoid the fate of the material. Existent only in memory, the deceased is perfectly singular.  

by Vasyl Makhno
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella

There was a time when the hills of Bazar were the highest and the greenest. And I carried the Dzhurynka River nestled in my shirt like a quail’s egg found in the grass. And the rains came to us like guests on the Intercession; and snow grazed on the banks of the Dzhurynka.

by Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

I sometimes do things that my friends never do.  As a matter of fact, I watch the local news of the occupied Ukrainian territories that these occupiers call "republics," and this looks like some kind of masochism, apparently.

by Andriy Tuzhykov
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan.

The Ukrainian People's House in Chernivtsi, where Anna works, is surrounded by three streets: Ukrainian street, Armenian street, and Yakob von Petrovich street, named after the Armenian mayor of Chernivtsi. Sometimes, they simply say Jakob Petrovich street without the prefix “von”, for it makes the democrats get too annoyed, so both versions are used in the various guides, web pages and street conversations. In front of the People's House there is an Armenian church which also serves as a concert hall. 

by Oleksandr Boichenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

In the country of a constantly fierce, although predominantly contrived ideological struggle, Meridian professes the ideology of tolerance. In the country where Russian still remains the language of interethnic communication, Meridian speaks a dozen languages. In the country filled  up to the brim with vodka, Meridian promotes a culture of wine consumption.

by Oleksandr Boichenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan and Zenia Tompkins

Since writers (Kundera, in particular, but long before him: Strindberg, Joyce or Celan, for example) have suggested to critics that a literary work can be composed in accordance with the laws of music, the latter – that is, the critics – began to use, where it was necessary and not, terms such as a "poem-fuga," "drama-sonata," "novel-symphony" and so on. 

by Kelsey Farish

With neither friends nor family to meet me at the airport, I stumbled out of a black cab and into central London. It was early September, and I was twenty-three. My two old suitcases had barely survived the transatlantic flight, and were refusing to stay still. They continually found themselves in someone else’s way as I navigated through Victoria Station. I was painfully aware of each inelegant fumble I made over cobblestoned pavement and my awkward hesitations at crosswalks, uncertain of which direction to look for oncoming traffic.

by Raffi Gostanian

Legend has it that Tunisia was founded in the ninth century BC by a woman. Her name was Elissar (also known as Elissa, or Alyssar). The legend goes roughly like this:According to the Greek historian Timaeus, King Belus of the Phoenician Empire of Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) nominated both his son Pygmalion and his daughter Elissar to be his heirs. Pygmalion, however, was a tyrant; he usurped the throne, killing his sister’s husband and forcing her to flee.

by Olga Morkova

In March of 2014, a few days after Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula, my mother called to warn me against returning home. A new border between Crimea and Ukraine had been established overnight, and tanks were rolling down the street outside of my parent’s house. As a human rights lawyer and pro-Ukrainian activist, she knew that I would be labeled an enemy of the Russian government. I am now a foreigner in my own home. Ukrainian phone lines stopped working in Crimea soon after, and I could no longer call my parents. 
 

by Aleksey Porvin
Translated from the Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The tree must see—under your feet
a dove drops its feathers—take them;
your plumage will be white
if you choose an easy flightpath.

Late cherries—round wounds
remember what arrowhead
made them in the wet summer wind.
They remember, but you must forget.

by Olena Jennings

I remembered the scene when her lover got trampled
by an elephant.  She lifted herself above the despair.
Last time I went dancing I was at the level of sky.
I felt my body unfold because I was so close
to getting what I wanted and then it folded again

by John LaPine

The Girl with No Tail has no balance.
She teeters on the brink,
eclipses precipice. Threat of falling does not
thump hard in her chest, does not live
in her throat, her tiny black throat.
She lives like danger becomes her.
She lets herself wobble against
wind, a branchless tree: thin.

by Wanda Deglane

You’re crouched outside the car, limbs folded 
like a broken sun chair, spluttering and vomiting 
against rocks that gut your hands like first-century nails.
I’m gripping the seat, picturing the world about to go 
tumbling, frozen by gravity that wasn’t there minutes ago. 
The music explodes through the speakers, tries to drown 
out the sounds of your shuddering, your gasping for air, 
your downhill battles that shred the still night in two.

by Slavick Ciganec
Translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings

in her eyes a sign should read “swimming prohibited”
no one knows how many of those who ignored it drowned 
one day you’ll want to try it 
but there is one tiny problem
you must dive to the very bottom
and come face to face with the heavenly
or martyrs

by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The airport terminal is only familiar because Nietzsche is—there he stands, with a silent yawp. Your body murmurs but you learn to extrapolate the creaks into joint movements. These scrapes of glue paper and unwanted items – unreal carpet route, real scrap. How less we require. How much we desire, how much we have, how much we keep, of it all, the body is closest.

by Sergey Lebedev
Translated from the Russian by Dmytro Kyyan

They could arrest the garden gnomes,
exterminate swallows and spiders,
roll a granite pavement in asphalt,
take out to the East
the porcelain figurines from a chest of drawers
that peeped through the window,
replace the human souls
with an overcoat cloth

by Selina Mahmood

show me then,
the pen you used
to incise my lands.
show me the shoes
you had worn,
the blackness of
their polish

by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Meticulous Demeter’s revenge was slow but vicious;
she bred innumerable souls to choke the underworld
and laced them with her own ethos; her triumphs
sickened its entombed monarch, and soon he was impotent

by Snežana Žabić

There are life forms who slash the cheek
of a refugee, lay eggs like lizards, drown in their siestas.
Immigrants talk about papers, Dubai, Cambodia,
Singapore, migrate pleasure and work.