The Kopilka Project: Collaborative Translation of Russian Anti-war Poetry

The Kopilka Project was begun by the poet and scholar Julia Nemirovskaya immediately after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, as a way to gather and safeguard Russophone anti-war poems. This visionary online archive has since grown into the largest repository of its kind, with more than 1000 anti-war poems and 300 poets by the end of 2023. The Kopilka has served as the basis of three poetry anthologies to date: Non à la guerre! (Paris, Éditions Caractères, 2022); Disbelief, a bilingual English-Russian anthology (UK, Ripon: Smokestack Books, 2023); and the forthcoming bilingual Dislocation (Slavica Press 2024). This chapter focuses on the team of translators working from Russian into English—the majority of them are bilingual speakers with roots in Russia/the former USSR now residing in the USA—their motivation, and the collective identity that has emerged over the course of work for two anthologies and beyond, and the practicalities of translation as teamwork involving mutual editing.