Translated poetry seldom finds a home in this column – if only because when youhave no knowledge of the original language, the reading can be like trying to see through frosted glass. But the Ukrainian poet Iryna Shuvalova is a revelation. This is her fifth collection, her first to be translated into English, and it is extraordinary to read partly because, even though these poems were written before the war (touching on the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea), they offer insight into what it is to be Ukrainian at this catastrophic moment in her country’s history. She was born in Kyiv, is a fine linguist herself (a translator of Ted Hughes into Ukrainian) and has collaborated on the translation of her own work with the American poet Olena Jennings. She has completed a PhD at Cambridge about communities affected by the war in Ukraine’s east.
pray to the empty wells is a heart-stirring, gallant and prescient collection that reminds you of the otherness of poetry, its territorial freedoms and viewless wings (what cannot be seen – only imagined – is critical). It is dominated by the spirit to survive, to embrace nature and to pray. The tremendous Ukrainian-Jewish-American poet Ilya Kaminsky hails Shuvalova as someone who “builds a country of dreams in order to survive in one of real drama”. He sees young, optimistic Ukrainian poets as among the most energetic working in Europe.
