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Translating Poetry in a Time of War: An Aid Kit of War Songs

Join us for a special presentation from Amelia Glaser, a professor of Literature and a translator of contemporary Ukranian poetry.

"We've packed a contraband humanitarian aid kit of war songs, and shipped it to Europe America India and China, paving the silk road with great Ukrainian literature." The Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva wrote these lines in 2022. It was a month into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the poem expressed something many readers around the world had begun to feel while anxiously following the news. Ukraine, in its improbable struggle to defend its democracy, had been giving something essential to the rest of the world.

Since 2022, the rest of the world has watched as Ukraine has articulated what matters to a young democratic state: the ability to choose one’s own leaders, to defend historical truth with a small “t”, a civic society that can accommodate multiple languages, histories, religions.

In this talk, Amelia Glaser, a professor of Literature who is also a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, will share how translation has drawn her closer to a group of Ukrainian poets. This is the story of contemporary Ukrainian poets who have pushed language to its creative limit as a way of imagining a nation at a moment of transformation, loss, and resistance. It is a story about why poetry matters in an increasingly complex world.

About our presenter:

Amelia Glaser grew up in Yountville, and attended Yountville Elementary School, Redwood Middle School, and Vintage High. She is now a professor of Literature at UC San Diego, and is an expert in East European literature as well as a translator. Her books include Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine. At UC San Diego, she founded the Translation and Poetry program, which places college students into K-12 classes to teach the art of poetic translation. She also founded Alchemy, a student-edited journal of translation published at UCSD. Since the 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine, she has translated four books of poetry by contemporary poets into English, including work by Halyna Kruk, Iya Kiva, and Yaryna Chornohuz. She is especially interested in how poetry and the translation of poetry can unite communities in unexpected ways. She is currently finishing a book titled Ukraine: Nation of Poets, about why poetry matters in the 21st century.

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