Voice of Ukraine

From: Ira Kapitonova (Day 742):

‭‭I cry to you, O Lord;
I say, “You are my refuge,
my portion in the land of the living.”
Psalm 142:5

I came across a column by Uilleam Blacker, a University College London professor. In this column, he writes about the phenomenon of wartime literature. I’ll share a few quotes that seemed insightful to me.

“For [the Western audience], literature is primarily art, entertainment, intellectual and spiritual education. It is not a literal means of survival, a tool that allows us to live with someone else’s dying cry in our ears. Literature should not be a burden.”

“I believe Halyna Kruk [a Ukrainian poet] says that the meaning of literature is not to allow oneself to escape from reality or to soften it, but to be able to perceive reality in all its sharpness, and then learn to live with what we saw. This is exactly what Ukrainian wartime literature teaches us. It is not about heroes, commanders, or the army. It is about the people who remain after the army has left. It is about how these people can live on and how those who never lived through war can understand, speak, and help those who have experienced it.”

“An intense search for what it’s like to be a human being next to other humans during the war, what it’s like to be an ordinary person who cries, bleeds, laughs and dances at the same time: that’s what I’ve learned in the last two years of reading new Ukrainian war poetry. It moved me, challenged me, enveloped me, and shook me in a way that no other poetry has managed to do.”

At the end of his article in the “The Ukrainians” media, Uilleam Blacker shares his translation of a wartime poem by Halyna Kruk. May it move and challenge you and give you a poetic glimpse into the life of Ukraine today.

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Can I take two more steps, or should I pause right here
beside the scattered bodies in unnatural positions,
beside the rusty, burned-out car, its wounds from shells
too big to kill just a single individual.
Aesthetically, it’s too much — the world won’t buy it.
The lack of a logical motive: explain it, you say,
why are they killing you — there must be a reason,
a motivation. This is not how a good plot is built.
Watching from afar, you can always stop in time,
not get too close, where the eye sees too much –
an ugly broken nail on a well-groomed female hand,
a child’s shoe mixed with the rest of the apartment’s contents.
Literature, one might think, exists to convince us
that the lost child’s shoe and the leg are not the same thing,
that a broken nail is no big deal.
That’s if you stop in time, don’t get too close, don’t scrutinize.
That safe distance, those borders within which this can all still be
a banal, contrived plot, the forbidden fruit of a catastrophizing imagination.
Literature is no longer an escape route: it’s a side track
from which no train ever leaves.
You get on the train, and you understand: it cannot help you, don’t you see?
Someday, in an emergency, you’ll unblock this side track,
you’ll remove the buffers from this dead-end line and let yourself look.
In a world where literature exists not to kill,
nor to settle scores,
nor to forewarn,
nor to commit every detail to memory,
when you don’t want to see what lies
beneath the rubble on the news and in the photographs.

Such literature is good for nothing.

The child’s shoe, which flew into the air from the child’s foot,
when they were mixed with the shards of glass and concrete,
the woman’s broken fingernail emerging from the rubble,
the unblurred remains of the body,
the child’s book that you focus on
so as not to see the rest
so as not to imagine the rest:
what happened between the book and the hand,
between that moment in a family’s Saturday morning and the next scene.
You come too close and are pierced by the shrapnel
Of someone’s muffled last scream
“I don’t want to die.”

Literature exists so we can live with that cry in our ears,
with that hand, with that shoe,
knowing what happened to them in unblurred reality,
unsoftened by artificial intelligence.

That’s why literature exists.