The eighth volume in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, co-translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella, brings together a selection of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry written over the last four decades. Having established an English language following largely on the merits of a single poem, “We’ll Not Die in Paris,” Bilotserkivets’s larger body of work continues to be relatively unknown. Natalka Bilotserkivets was an active participant in Ukraine’s Renaissance of the late-Soviet and early independence period.
Now, nearly thirty years on, much has changed in the land of her birth, but the lyricism and urgency in Bilotserkivets’s poetry remain; her voice still speaks about movement and restricted movement, even symbolic movement. Listed by critic Ron Charles as a December 10, 2021 Washington Post Book Club recommendation, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow endeavors to go back to shed light on the missing history.
Praise for Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow
It is difficult for poems to make their way into the world under the best of circumstances. The art requires a disciplined inwardness and an ear profoundly attentive to the music of language. For poems to then find their way, alive, into another language requires great good fortune and the selfless commitment of translator-poets equal to the original. For them to arrive in the shimmering English of a master poet such as Dzvinia Orlowsky, collaborating with master translator Ali Kinsella, is something of a miracle. But, as we see here, miracles do sometimes occur.
—Askold Melnyczuk, author of The Man Who Would Not Bow
What a gift to the reader that the author of these poems embraces translation as its own act of creation, not slavish attention to original work that can result in a soul gutting process. Under translators Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky’s meticulous considerations, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems live and breathe in English, yet are suffused with Natalka’s voice, with her great heart beating deep within the work. To read this book is to understand why Bilotserkivets blessed the translations of Kinsella and Orlowsky. Her poems couldn’t have been left in better hands.
—Catherine Sasanov, author of Had Slaves