This report is taken from PN Review 270, Volume 49 Number 4, March - April 2023.
Disbelief
Last June the Leningrad-born Canadian translator Maria Bloshteyn contacted me regarding the Kopilka (Piggy Bank) Project, a massive online collection of Russophone poems written about – and against – the war in Ukraine, put together by poets and translators from all over the world (including many still living inside Russia).
Maria was the editor and main translator of Smokestack’s big bilingual anthology Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War, published in 2020 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war. She and the other Kopilka translators were looking for a publisher for a bilingual selection of poems about this new and very different war. I immediately offered to publish the book at Smokestack.
Smokestack’s list includes bilingual selections by a number of major Russian/Soviet poets from the Second World War – notably Simonov, Tvardovsky and Berggolts (next year Smokestack is publishing a selection of poems by Ilya Ehrenberg). Putting the Kopilka poets into print was a way of honouring those poets and the cause for which they fought. As Tatiana Voltskaya has written, ‘We’ll get what we deserve, and more. / Unholy war / Has tarnished grandad’s medals.’
Whatever arguments there may be about NATO expansion and Ukrainian nationalism, there can be no justification for a war that has left millions displaced and tens of thousands dead or imprisoned, triggered an international economic crisis, turned Russia into a pariah state and the Russian language into a tool of cultural erasure and oppression.
Since the start of the war, the Kremlin has been promoting ‘Z-Poetry’ ...
Maria was the editor and main translator of Smokestack’s big bilingual anthology Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War, published in 2020 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war. She and the other Kopilka translators were looking for a publisher for a bilingual selection of poems about this new and very different war. I immediately offered to publish the book at Smokestack.
Smokestack’s list includes bilingual selections by a number of major Russian/Soviet poets from the Second World War – notably Simonov, Tvardovsky and Berggolts (next year Smokestack is publishing a selection of poems by Ilya Ehrenberg). Putting the Kopilka poets into print was a way of honouring those poets and the cause for which they fought. As Tatiana Voltskaya has written, ‘We’ll get what we deserve, and more. / Unholy war / Has tarnished grandad’s medals.’
Whatever arguments there may be about NATO expansion and Ukrainian nationalism, there can be no justification for a war that has left millions displaced and tens of thousands dead or imprisoned, triggered an international economic crisis, turned Russia into a pariah state and the Russian language into a tool of cultural erasure and oppression.
Since the start of the war, the Kremlin has been promoting ‘Z-Poetry’ ...
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