On Translating Yuri Andrukhovych

The email from the great Russian poet Polina Barskova is still there in my UMass account: “Ostap can’t come to Amherst to read Yuri’s translations. One idea—you and I could read the English taking turns, sitting by him—what do you think?”

It was the end of 2018 (after the 2014 invasion of Donbas and Crimea, but before the world took notice in 2022) and Ostap Kin and I had just begun translating Serhiy Zhadan’s poems; Yuri Andrukhovych is Zhadan’s friend and possible mentor. There’s a famous (apocryphal?) story of the young Zhadan finding Andrukhovych’s address in the phone book and showing up at his front door. Zhadan knocked, Yuri answered, invited him in; there were drinks, food, intense talk, and that was that—the beginning of a great literary friendship. In the same spirit, I said yes to Polina. Of course. And to hosting an afterparty.

The preparation for that reading (from Songs for a Dead Rooster, translated by Ostap and Vitaly Chernetsky and published by Lost Horse Press in 2018) and the reading itself made those poems dear to me, and Yuri’s delivery beautifully conveyed their comedy and sadness in equal measure. Yuri’s presence and his quick wit even in English, his third or fourth language, also made him dear to me. It was a late night, in an easier era, capped off by a conversation with two new friends (excellent poets, Nathan McClain and JJ Starr) that lasted until five AM. Then the morning train to New York with Yuri and Polina and more to say, kept awake by great paper barrels of coffee.

What makes one commit to a translation project? These are the seeds of my commitment, years later, to work with Ostap on Set Change, our selected poems of Andrukhovych. Yuri is a translator himself—Robert Walser (a personal favorite, another point of connection), Rilke, and Shakespeare—and while he answers our questions patiently and in detail, and can certainly help us with the English rendering, he never insists and always defers to us. In this regard he’s a model of nonattachment, which only makes one more devotedly attached to this project.