Halyna Kruk, ‘a woman with a heart this heavy cannot fly’

trans. by 
Ali Kinsella
 and 
Dzvinia Orlowsky

***

a woman with a heart this heavy cannot fly
like a leaf held to asphalt by a rock
like a page from a book disassembled into quotes . . .
a few minutes for meetings, a few snatched words for introductions
her eyes wide open like the door to her parents’ house
where all her childhood memories are kept in an old marshmallow tin
she says, ‘if not him, then no one will get them . . .’
the black butterfly of despair, the sharp smell of ether
who will revive her, return her to her passport photo
who will hold her thin, sobbing shoulders

the air raid siren lifts city birds into the air
but that heaviest thing in her doesn’t allow for flight

 

Translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky from Halyna Kruk, Галина Крук: Стається і не перестає (A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha, 2024), p. 249.

Tanya Savchynska

Tanya Savchynska is a literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she studied on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was a 2019 resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in Canada and a 2023 resident at the Art Omi Translation Lab in the US. Her writing and translations have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Apofenie, and elsewhere. Her translation of Kateryna Zarembo’s Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s was published by Academic Studies Press in 2024.

Martin Lohrer
Cover Image for Culture as Security

Culture as Security

This issue of the London Ukrainian Review takes a look at culture as a matter of national security. Highlighting the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms, it also examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.

Sasha Dovzhyk