Ostap Kin, editor and translator
John Hennessy, translator
Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications, HURI
In Person and Online
On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews by machine gun at a ravine near Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, some 100,000 to 150,000 had been exterminated at the ravine. The name of Babyn Yar is now synonymous with one of the most horrific massacres of World War II. Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond presents poems by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, written in response to the tragic and senseless mass murders at Babyn Yar.
Babyn Yar editor and translator Ostap Kin and translator John Hennessy join us for a discussion of the Babyn Yar massacre and their new book (forthcoming from HURI), which presents this collection of poems in the original Ukrainian and English translation. In addition to offering historical background about the massacre, they will read several selections and discuss the poems and art of translation.
Edited by Ostap Kin
Translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
Introduction by Ostap Kin
The present collection is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar that the world commemorated in 2021. This book 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 John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.
Written in 1941–2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and timeframes, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond seek to 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.
| Ostap Kin is the translator and editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond, as well as the anthology New York Elegies, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Prize for Best Translation. He is the co-translator of Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography, which won the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry (with Canisia Lubrin). | |
| John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The Huffington Post, Jacket, The New Republic, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry at Sangam (India), and Poetry Ireland Review. He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, 2021, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (forthcoming from Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP). Their new translations of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych have appeared in NYRB, TLS, and The New Statesman. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. |
Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications, Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
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LOCATION:K-354 CGIS Knafel, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230308T213000Z DTEND:20230308T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR