Ostap Kin
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Bio
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (forthcoming from Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute) and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best translation. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kin and his collaborator, poet and translator John Hennessy, are recipients of the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation awarded by Poetry magazine, and have translated Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (forthcoming) and Serhiy Zhadan's A New Orthography, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Ukrainian of poetry by Yuri Andrukhovych. Born in 1960, Andrukhovych is one of the most significant, contemporary Ukrainian authors and leading representatives of postmodernism in Ukraine, with more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays published. This project will draw from his first three collections spanning ten years and set mostly in the historical region of Galicia. The poems address shifting borders, ordinary people, a history of violence, and include mythical and fantastical elements. Kin will collaborate with John Hennessy, poetry editor at The Common and senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts.
The poems by Yuri Andrukhovych my co-translator John Hennessy and I are working on showcase the poet’s prolonged quest for a language, or rather languages, that can offer an aesthetic response to the history of violence. The poems illustrate the paradoxes of imagination that define Eastern European history, especially the history of the last hundred years. Andrukhovych’s poems are central to contemporary Ukrainian literature for many reasons. The poet works with varied settings and various themes of geography, shifting borders, with imagery that captures ordinary individuals, and many diverse stories and histories—as well as with a gamut of myths and fantastical elements. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, we will be able to work on a collection of selected poems, in dialogue with the author, that will be a critical instrument in understanding both the world that shapes Andrukhovych’s work and the world(s) Andrukhovych has created.
About Yuri Andrukhovych
Yuri Andrukhovych is one of most significant Ukrainian authors today and the leading representative of postmodernism in Ukraine. Andrukhovych is mainly known in the Anglophone world as a prose writer. However, it was poetry he began writing initially and his prose, which is infused with all kinds of poetical associations, methods, and styles, clearly grows from it.