# From History to Poetry: The Galician Time Machine September 05, 2024 Mykolaj Suchy - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) ![Mykolaj Suchy](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/mykolaj_suchy_photo.jpeg?itok=xbuvueza) ## by Mykolaj Suchy I scanned the pages of my grandmother’s red notebook for sentences and phrases I could understand. It began, “*For the second time in my life I’m writing a journal. The interesting phenomenon is…*” I couldn’t decipher the letters that followed. I searched for letters I recognized, and compared those I didn’t recognize with the words I already understood. Still nothing. I brought the letters I was confident about into my ‘Galician dictionary,’ and started searching. My Galician dictionary, like its editors, comes from Canada. Its language is the Ukrainian of the diaspora. The language is familiar to many Ukrainians outside of Ukraine. Inside Ukraine, however, things are different. In Lviv, I watched my mother ask for directions in the language of the Ukrainian diaspora. The reply came with a puzzled question — “And where are you from?” “From the past,” I thought to myself. In class, my Galician dictionary wasn’t very helpful. It turned a 'gathering' into a 'mob of people,' and played other devilish tricks. I came to know the Galician dictionary as a monument to a language that no longer exists. But if the Galician dictionary is a monument, it is also a time machine. I used it to take myself to a time when the language it holds lived beyond the pages of archives and books; to the time when my grandmother wrote in her red notebook. But my time machine can only take me where I tell it to, and I have managed to decode only fragments of my grandmother’s notebook. Some of those fragments: *… strange houses … in the distance … movement … people run.* *… meat, in the suburbs of Stryi.* *My dear land, Ukraine.* As a budding translator, these shards were like nuggets of gold to a weary prospector. When I began trying to read and translate my grandmother’s writings, I thought of them as historical documents and a family chronicle. Stuck in translation with fragments of language, I changed my thinking. I needed a creative solution to read between the lines where I couldn’t comprehend her handwriting, the faint marks of a pencil, or the places where water had made the ink run together. I kept hacking away at the words I didn’t understand and began to analyze those I did. I got a general sense of what my grandmother was writing about, a series of sometimes absurd ‘poems’ and strings of words, and a voice marked by history. Pages written as clear prose are now understood only as something between prose and poetry. Before my grandmother wrote down her experiences, my great-grandfather wrote multiple journals detailing his experience as a prisoner of war in Siberia. His voice was lost to history — when the arrival of the Red Army was imminent, he burned all his journals. Baba’s writings about her flight from home and life as a refugee may always remain between prose and poetry. Understanding them will take work — a labor of love. Today, many others are writing diaries in the same place my grandmother wrote hers. Their first headings might be the same — “*Утече*.” The entries being written today do not, however, require a desk lamp and magnifying glass to read. They are clear. They are accompanied by pictures, audio, and video. The words I did manage to find in my grandmother’s notebook reminded me of texts we read in class: the themes and tones were the same as those in Victoria Amelia’s poems and Ostap Slyvynsky’s *Dictionary of War*. Our memory is vast and powerful. As I begin to understand the words my grandmother wrote more than 80 years ago, I am hopeful that I will find an answer to how to live in trying times. So far, all I’ve found is solace in knowing that we are not alone. Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)