Tag: 2023

The Torture Camp on Paradise Street

Stanislav Aseyev – Author
Zenia Tompkins, Nina Murray – Translators

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute – Publisher

“In recognition of this personal memoir that not only testifies to the human rights violations committed by the Russian Federation, but also exposes the truth behind the existence of unofficial prisons, illegal deprivation of liberty, and torture carried out by the occupier in the city of Donetsk.”

The book chronicles journalist Stanislav Aseyev’s first-hand experience in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB). In the two years of his illegal imprisonment in an industrial factory called Izoliatsia, Aseyev and his fellow inmates have endured horrific psychological and physical abuse, torture, denigration, endless fear, and agony. This is a story of an individual who is vulnerable to the arbitrariness of, first and foremost, armed criminals, a story of survival in a place where all mechanisms of civilized humanity no longer function, and a story of hope to remain human in the most inhuman conditions. The captivity forever altered the author’s outlook on life, yet it did not leave him helpless or defeated.

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The Extraordinary Lives of Ukrainian Canadian Women:
Oral Histories of the Twentieth Century

Iroida Wynnyckyj – Editor
Marta Olynyk – Translator

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press – Publisher

“Recognized for its archival value in providing historians with multigenerational testimonies of Ukrainian Canadian women whose personal stories were shaped by the tumultuous events of two world wars.”

This collection of life stories recounted by ten Ukrainian Canadian women who lived through the turbulence of the First World War and horrors of the Second World War, later settling in Canada, provides insight into the plight of a stateless people caught between two totalitarian regimes.

Its value to historians, scholars, and researchers lies in the human dimension of these first-hand accounts, with all their emotions, deep-seated memories, and historical biases. It is a snapshot into the past and a reminder of how far Eastern and Central European communities have come to heal the deep wounds of war. And in many ways, the testimonies are a lesson in how powerlessness, disaffection, and the backdrop of war can breed prejudice, conflict, and human tragedy, while at the same time underscoring the often-elusive acts of human decency and triumph of hope.

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The Voices of Babyn Yar

Marianna Kiyanovska – Author
Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky – Translators

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute – Publisher

“In recognition of its masterful use of poetry to convey the unspeakable crimes committed at Babyn Yar, using a first-person perspective of Jewish voices to raise painful questions related to memory and responsibility.”

As one reviewer wrote, Babyn Yar is a part of Ukrainian history regardless of whether ethnic Ukrainians are buried there or not. Victims and their pain have no nationality—the same way crimes don’t have one. In this sense, The Voices of Babyn Yar is an attempt to hear these voices and comprehend the future through the past —today’s war through the previous war. The poems are an attempt to overcome hate speech by creating a supra-national language of the victim. 

Recently, the Polish translation of Voices of Babyn Yar earned author Marianna Kiyanovska the European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. It is the English translation of this moving collection of poems that earned the book its Peterson Literary Fund 2023 Translated Book Award.

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2023 Grand Prix for Excellence in Translation

Ukrayna: Bir Tarihsel Atlas

Paul Robert Magocsi – Author
Maryna Kravets, Victor Ostapchuk, Murat Yaşar – Translators

VakifBank Kültür Yayinlari (Türkiye) – Publisher

Paul Robert Magocsi / author

“The Grand Prix is given in recognition of this book’s importance in making Robert Magocsi’s comprehensive history of Ukraine accessible to a Turkish-speaking audience, thanks to its well-crafted translation.”

Ukraine is Europe’s second-largest country. This lavishly illustrated volume provides a concise and easy-to-read historical survey of Ukraine from earliest times to the present. Each of the book’s forty-six chapters is framed by a historical map, which graphically depicts the key elements of the chronological period or theme being discussed. In addition, the entire text is accompanied by sixteen statistical tables and over 300 historic photographs, line drawings, portraits, and reproductions of books and art works, which bring the rich past of Ukraine to life. 

This book emphasizes the multicultural nature of Ukraine throughout its history. While ethnic Ukrainians figure prominently, author Paul Robert Magocsi, (Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto) also deals with the many other peoples who live or who have lived within the borders of present-day Ukraine: Poles, Russians, Jews, Crimean Tartars, Germans (including Mennonites), and Greeks, among others. 

Ukraine: An Illustrated History is not only an indispensable resource for students and specialists in the European area and Slavic studies, it offers information for the media, businesspersons, government officials, as well as general readers interested in having easy access to fact-based information about historic political, economic, and cultural developments in Ukraine. 

And now it is available to a Turkish audience of readers.

Translators 

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Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love

Volodymyr Rafeyenko – Author
Mark Andryczyk – Translator

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute – Publisher

“In recognition of this book’s contribution to important processes of change in the way writers approach language in contemporary Ukrainian literature.”

In 2014, a well-known award-winning Russian-language writer from the Ukrainian city of Donetsk chose to escape his hometown because he did not want to live under Russian occupation. In 2019, displaced in Kyiv, he published his novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, which was his first ever literary work written in Ukrainian. Volodymyr Rafeyenko now insists that he will not go back to writing in Russian, which he once considered his native language. Rafeyenko represents a broader trend among Russian-language writers in Ukraine who, as a matter of principle, have switched to writing in Ukrainian. Indeed, they have changed not only their medium of communication, but their entire consciousness and world view.

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Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry (Вибірка з творів поза збірками та збірок: Круговерть, Зимові дерева, Веселий цвинтар)

Author: Vasyl Stus
Translators: Bohdan Tokarsky, Nina Murray
Translation: Ukrainian to English

Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry is the first professional book-length volume of Stus’ poetry in English translation. The book features more than a decade of Stus’ work, from his earliest texts to the period before his arrest by the KGB in 1972. A book of bold experimentation and virtuoso poetic versatility, Vortex captures Stus’ artistic evolution and the shifting political landscape of the USSR during a crucial period of the 1960s and early 1970s, juxtaposing existentialism and love lyric, expressionist metaphors and Ukrainian history, metaphysical depth, and the powerful energy of dissent.

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The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Українська інтелігенція і геноцид: боротьба за історію, мову і культуру в 1920-1930-х роках)

Author: Viktoria A. Malko
Translator: Viktoria A. Malko
Translation: English to Ukrainian 

Viktoria Malko examines the existential threats and ideological choices the Ukrainian intelligentsia faced as the first group targeted during the Holodomor genocide. Due to its influential patriotism and its leadership of Ukraine’s strong tradition of struggle for national liberation, the “brain of the nation”—the intelligentsia —became the epicentre of the Soviet-orchestrated genocide against Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide is an illuminating study of a decade that traumatised Ukraine as a nation and has shaped its politics to this very day, written by a historian specializing in Modern Europe and World History.

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Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West
(Україна, Середній Схід і Захід)

Author: Thomas Prymak
Translator: Nadia Zavorotna
Translation: English to Ukrainian

This fascinating and fluidly written book is unique in that it is the first scholarly monograph to treat Ukraine’s relations to the world outside eastern Europe. Thomas Prymak addresses geographical knowledge, international travel, political conflicts, historical relations with religiously diverse neighbours, artistic developments, and literary and language contacts to smash old stereotypes about Ukrainian isolation and tell a vivid and original story. The volume gives substance to Ukraine’s claim to an independent existence across the centuries and puts Ukraine on the map of the world, for historians, art museums, cultural institutions generally, and for the wider public.

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Solomea: Star of Opera’s Golden Age
(Соломія: Зірка Золотої доби опери)

Author: Andriy Semotiuk
Translators: Halyna Stashkiw
Translation: English to Ukrainian

Solomea Krushelnytska was Ukraine’s greatest opera star and a leading lyric-dramatic soprano in the Golden Age of opera in the first decade of the 1900s. Known as the soprano who “rescued” Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, her legacy is revered in Ukraine and her life is only now coming to light in Europe and North America. The English-language book, released in 2022, is the most authoritative biographical work on Krushelnytska and, with this translation, her life story will be available to the Ukrainian-speaking world. 

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The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky (Берег чекань: культурологічне дослідження шістдесятників)

Author: Simone Attilio Bellezza
Translator: Marharyta Yehorchenko
Translation: English to Ukrainian 

Simone Bellezza reconstructs the history of the shistdesiatnyky—the generation of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals (artists, writers, scientists) who spearheaded the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s. Bellezza’s analysis begins with the awakening of artistic and literary expression during the so-called Soviet Thaw and describes the complex relationship that this young cultural elite had with the Soviet authorities until the mass arrests and repressions of intellectuals in January 1972. The Shore of Expectations was awarded the 2020 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies.

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