Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond

by John Hennessy (Translator)

Overview

In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1941 and 2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674275591
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/30/2023
Series:	Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature , #4
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ostap Kin is the translator and editor of the anthology New York Elegies, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Prize for Best Translation, and is the cotranslator of Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography and Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster. He is Research Center Coordinator at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.

John Hennessy is the author of two poetry collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel. He is the poetry editor of The Common and is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With Ostap Kin, Hennessy translated Serhiy Zhadan’s collection A New Orthography, for which they won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation.

Editorial Reviews

Kin’s is the first and only collection to date to focus exclusively on Ukrainian-language poems…the inclusion of poems from distinct literary traditions and historical epochs offers valuable avenues towards our understanding of this complex topic. By bringing these horrendous events into the public eye, the poems’ heartbreaking insights thus offer reflections on the massacre and its ongoing significance, an act of memorialization within a changing political landscape in which an unresolved past remains.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies - Hazel Frankel

A welcome addition to the library on Ukrainian literature, history, and modern society. While its primary audience is scholars of Ukrainian and Slavic literatures, it is also highly relevant to anyone seeking to understand the Holocaust and World War II, as well as the existential problem of extreme human cruelty, such as that observed in Ukraine at present.

Ab Imperio - Martin Paulsen

Remind[s] the reading public of not only the necessity of remembering history and taking a stand against evil, but also about the necessity of poetry as witness during a time of great atrocity.

New Eastern Europe - Nicole Yurcaba

Temporally and stylistically expansive, Babyn Yar keeps company with other recent poetry that confronts the costs of war and genocide: Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Each poetic work catalogs grief intimately in the aftermath of political violence. That the Russia–Ukraine War is ongoing at the time of this writing infuses the anthology with a terrible urgency.

World Literature Today - Kathryn Savage