Translating Halyna Krouk’s poems

January 18, 2006 The act of translating Halyna Krouk’s poems corresponds with the discovery of self within her poems. First, I experienced the words on a physical level. They were entities that made the leap from one language to the other, at times gracefully and naturally and at other times awkwardly. Then, I spent time with the words in attempt to find the essence of Halyna’s poetic world, recreating some of them to fit my perceptions and to make them tangible for the English language reader.

This set of poems exists on two levels, which I experienced while translating them. There is an exterior world of image and story and another in which Halyna makes discoveries almost by accident. In one poem, she finds she is mourning the disappearance of a boy she did not know she missed. In another, she finds the meaning of her life in a world full of tragedy. These discoveries alienate her. There is evidence of this alienation throughout her poems. It can be found in ‘Chanson in two couplets and a refrain’ when she writes “at each turn one more door closes for us” and in ‘she will never become their idol . . .’ when she writes “everywhere foreign land and her language no one understands.” Nevertheless, even as she is lost, she is grounded in the language I hope to have faithfully portrayed.

The elusive ‘you’ in her poems made me, as a translator, feel some ownership over the poems. It created an intimacy. It was as if Halyna was having a conversation with me and I could go on to make the poems mine. The strong assertion that “poets don’t have gender” also left me with the feeling that the poet could be anyone. This gave me even more permission to make her poetic voice my own, if only for the duration of the translation.