A Review of Natalka Bilotserkivets’ Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (2021, Lost Horse Press)

“Sometimes this war is very desperate, very tragic, and other days it’s more hopeful,” poet Natalka Bilotserkivets observes in a 2016 interview with Trafika Europe Radio. Throughout the hour-long conversation, she highlights poetry’s possibilities for easing the existential sting of violence and war:

I try to follow and see what is happening, and there was an interesting list provided by a volunteer…and one of the things they said they wanted to have more of is more books…in the middle I found a little line that said “more current Ukrainian poets”—and this was probably the most rewarding thing I have read about poetry and the place of poets. The soldiers, who do not know whether they’re going to live tomorrow, want to read more Ukrainian poetry. 

As I listen now, six-years later, this observation feels remarkably prescient. In the time following this interview, Russia intensified its occupation of Ukraine’s eastern regions, and in February of 2022, launched a full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory and war against the Ukrainian people. Ukrainian poets and their translators, including Bilotserkivets, continue to play a crucial role in bridging global audiences to these chasms of loss. Poetry emerges through the war as a new topography: a landscape through which grief can be marked, named, and known. 

In the new bilingual collection of Bilotserkivets’ poetry, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, published by Lost Horse Press in 2021, co-translators Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky achieve what Orlowsky describes in her Translator’s Note as “a voice that thrives on abbreviation and vibrant imagery.” Divided into five parts and organized chronologically, Kinsella and Orlowsky carefully reveal for their English-reading audience the clarity of the poet’s conviction regarding Ukrainian-language poetry’s position on the global stage, as well as the urgency of its political contributions. As Kinsella writes in the Introduction, “Poetry of (Non)Neutrality,” Bilotserkivets’ early work often drew from Ukrainian folktales to challenge the constraints set forth by Soviet censorship. For her, “folktales are not merely cute,” but offer something more defiant. “While emphasizing the specifically Ukrainian nightingale or lame ducking, she was also highlighting Ukraine’s position in world culture.” 

Emerging as part of the visimdesiatnyky (“eightiers”) generation of Ukrainian poets, Bilotserkivets’ developed her poetic voice during the transitional moment of perestroika—the Soviet Union’s attempt at political and economic reform just prior to its collapse in 1991. Much of her writing reflects this increasingly open, and thereby volatile, political moment. For instance, in the prologue—the poem from which the collection gets its title, “Children” (“Dity”)—Bilotserkivets writes: 

Sometimes someone
remembers what we wore and drank
and listened to in cramped cafes
in times of languor—in eccentric days
of beauty, hope, worry, and sorrow. 

Here, she mourns the past, using the word “zastoyu,” translated by Kinsella and Orlowsky as “languor,” but also implying stagnation—perhaps a reference to the Soviet period itself. Yet, through memory, she reflects on the possibilities of a new generation, as she adds, “you’ll be better than us. If you’re not/betrayed by the start of happy changes/that flickered above us so late.” She articulates this anger with even more urgency, in “Not Everyone Has Returned,” Bilotserkivets denounces the violence of “the state machine,” which has “ground their bones and minds,/Where the bloody work had not yet stopped.” 

It is Bilotserkivets’ ire for a lost or stolen youth that textures her political voice throughout the collection, continually folded into forms of memory and forgetting. We see this in “In a Forgotten Corner,” where she, begins “You are thirteen/Like a foal,/your big, bathed soul’s so/ungainly and fearlessly clean” This lament is perhaps most recognizable in one of her most well-known poems, “We’ll Not Die in Paris”—a title borrowed by the first line of Peruvian poet, César Vallejo’s, “Black Stone on a White Stone” (“Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca”). The poem became something of a mantra for young Ukrainians during perestroika, reflecting their awareness of a mythologized “Europe” inaccessible to them. Orlowsky’s translation, moreover, moves the reader through Bilotserkivets’ perceived provinciality: “we’ll not die in Paris   I know now for sure/but in a sweat and tear-stained provincial bed.” This language reappears in the translations from her 1999 collection, Allergy (Alerhiya), referencing “Days we’ve survived, like grass/in our garden: ruddy, yellow, brown.” And even more prophetically:

A rustling of flags
no longer brings delight or hope
only terrifying tanks on the Maidan
on a Monday afternoon

Between Kinsella, an American who became fluent in Ukrainian during her near five-years in Ukraine as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and who has since received an MA in East European History and Literature in addition to her extensive work as a translator; and Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize-winning Ukrainian-American poet, translator, and editor—the quality of their translation demonstrates their individual and shared skillfulness and poetic sensitivity. I did find myself wanting more context around the poems, especially in terms of time and place of their publications; however, there is also a sense in which this absence brings a fluidity and perennial quality to the collection.

Even despite these months of war’s brutality, hope audaciously rises though the language and promise of poetry. As Odesa-born poet, Ilya Kaminsky relayed conversation with a friend in a tweet from late-February 2022, wherein he asks, “how can I help, please let me know I really want help,” to which his friend responded, “Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.”

“And, that is in the middle of a war,” Kaminsky pondered, “Imagine.” Or as Bilotserkivets adds in her aforementioned interview, “That is a bigger thank you for what we’re doing in society than what would be given to us by some distinguished professor from some podium in a big university.”

Reviewed by Sandra Joy Russell