“Life Goes on, Defying Common Sense”: On Translating Russian Émigré Poetry

In this chapter, I consider the impact of Russia’s eight-year war on Ukraine, and especially the launch of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, on my identity as a Russophone Ukrainian and on my work as a literary translator from Russian. I offer a capsule history of my native city Odesa in order to explain my sense of myself as a Ukrainian as well as my preferences as a translator, which, in the field of prose, have leaned decidedly towards Russophone Ukrainian authors or to those associated with the so-called Southern School of Russophone literature. I then examine my preferences as a translator of verse and affirm my commitment to another branch of Russophone literature: the poetry of exile. Citing, contextualizing, and analyzing my translations of Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935), Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), and Vladislav Ellis (1913–1975), I argue that the poems left behind by several generations of Russophone émigrés “are a piercingly nuanced record of their own shifting, conflicted attitudes towards their displacement”—a record in which people displaced from any place, at any time, can find echoes of their own experiences.