CLASSIC AND MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN UKRAINE

CLASSIC AND MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN UKRAINE

The project of the Astrolabe Publishing. It is implemented with the financial support of the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme and co-funded by the © POLAND programme of the Book Institute (Krakow)

The project of the Astrolabe Publishing, for the first time among Ukrainian publishing houses, won the grant in the Literary Translation contest of the Creative Europe programme. The project will be implemented during 2018–2019 and includes translation, preparation for printing, printing, distribution and promotion of 8 high-quality artistic works of classic and modern European literature. The project also aims to promote the development of translation culture in Ukraine. Highly professional translators, such as Olena Brosalina (O’Lear), Taras Luchuk, Andriy Pavlyshyn, Nataliya Snyadanko, Maksym and Iaroslava Strikha, Yaryna Tarasyuk, Bohdan Chuma, are involved.

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AUTHOR

Jacek Dukaj, born July 30, 1974, one of the most interesting contemporary Polish writers, the first winner of the European Union Prize for Literature as well as numerous other awards and prizes for works in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. He is the author of novels, tales and collections of short stories, in particular: In PartibusInfidelium, The Cathedral, Black Oceans, An Ideal imperfection, Extensa, The Plunderer’s Daughter, Other Songs etc. And Ice and The Crow became the true bestsellers of this Krakόw writer, the worthy heir to the traditions of Stanisław Lem.

WORK

Ice (Lód) is an impressive monumental work of the cult Polish writer. The plot of the novel sparkles with sudden turns, political, criminal, scientific and metaphysical intrigues. This novel is full of catching characters, its action begins in the dirty slum of the czarist Warsaw and then shifts to the luxurious roomette cars of the Trans-Siberian Express on the background of the Iced Asia, continues in the salons of rich burgesses of Irkutsk, gangster dens and refuges of Martynovheretics, and finally in the very heart of Winter. This is a book that will appeal to admirers of a true epic, the literature that prompts intellect and imagination.

TRANSLATOR

Andriy Pavlyshyn (Андрій Павлишин), born July 30, 1964 in Lviv, a Ukrainian translator, writer, journalist. Graduated from the Faculty of History of Ivan Franko University of Lviv, worked as a journalist for Ukrainian and Polish magazines, co-founder of the Book Forum in Lviv, taught the theory of translation at the Ukrainian Catholic University.Translates from Polish and English. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, in 2015 he won the Polish PEN Club Prize for his achievements in the field of translation.

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AUTHOR

Kevin Barry, born in 1969 in Limerick, Ireland, is a renowned modern Irish writer, author of short stories and novels, one of which, City of Bohane, was honoured with the Dublin Literary Award, outcompeting such authors as Haruki Murakami and Michel Houellebecq. A laureate of numerous other awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature.The bold creator of new forms in literature. He traveled a lot, worked as a freelance journalist, lived in an auto caravan,rendered habitable the barracks of the former British police, finally settled down in Dublin due to, he said, the difficulty in transporting a large number of books during relocation. Foto © Martina Kenji

WORK

City of Bohane, by genre, is a futuristic gangster novel. 2053, the post-apocalyptic West Ireland. Logan Hartnett, the charismatic leader of the gang of Hipsters, has ruled the city of Bohane for many a year — and is going to rule the same bit more. But there are certain problems: his long-time rival returns to the city after a long banishment, in the poor flat blocks in the north a competing gang begins to flailtheir fists, and his own subordinates spin intrigues. Will he be able to retain his power, or at least his head on his shoulders? And is there a future for the one enamored of the lost past of the city divided between several clans? The novel is honoured by the European Union Prize for Literature (2012) and the International Dublin Literary Award (2013).

TRANSLATOR

Iaroslava Strikha (Ярослава Стріха), literary scholar and translator, born in 1988 in Kyiv, graduated from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2011, and in 2017 received a Master’s degree in Philology from Harvard University. A freelance translator from English, Yiddish, Polish and Russian.She has translated works by such authors as Kate Atkinson, Victoria Aveyard, AndrzejSulimaKamiński, Tarek Osman, Amos Oz, Cynthia Ozick. 

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AUTHOR

Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1344–1400, an English state official, thinker, translator and poet, who is reckoned among the founders of English national literature and the creators of Modern English. His poems The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Parlement of Foules, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women as well as scientificA Treatise on the Astrolabe, etc. have come down to us. However, Chaucer gained immortal glory with his poem The Canterbury Tales above all.

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The Canterbury Tales is one of the masterpieces of medieval European literature. This is a collection of several tales written in verse and united with the general story of the band of pilgrims who go to Canterbury for pilgrimage in order to worship the relics of St. Thomas Beckett. Each of them, with a view to entertain his comrades, tells interesting stories he/she knows. These narratives, different in content and subject matter, clearly represent different social strata and aspects of English social life of the time.

TRANSLATOR

Maksym Strikha (Максим Стріха), born June 24, 1961 in Kyiv, aUkrainian physicist, public figure, translator, writer. A Chief Researcher at the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Professor of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine. Poeticaland prose works by Dante, Marlowe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Poe, Whitman, Stevenson, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Márai, Miłosz and otherswere published in his translations. He is awarded the Maksym Rylsky Prize of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine for his translation of Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy. Hell (2015). 

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AUTHOR

Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857–1924, a world-renowned English writer of Polish origin and Ukraine-born, author of numerous novels and short stories. The basis for them was acomprehension of his own experience of service in the French, Belgian and British merchant fleets. His creations are marked by deep penetration in the soul of his characters, ashrewd diagnosis of the psychological drama of today’sman and have a significant influence on literature and cinematography up to the present.

WORK

In the novel Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, unfabled events in a fictitious country in South America are described. This is the story of tyranny under various guises and the struggle against it, the chaos of war that raises the one and destroys the other, the price of wealth and the depreciation of man, faith and life without it, love and death in a country in which nothing changes. In 1998, the work was included in the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and the American writer Scott Fitzgerald once noted that he would rather “have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.”

TRANSLATOR

Olena O’Lear (Олена О’Лір), Olena Brosalina, born on March 9, 1976 in Kyiv, a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary scholar. In 1999 she graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. Translates Irish and British poets, prose and poetical works by J. R. R. Tolkien, novels and tales by Joseph Conrad, an author of several collections of her own poetry. A winner of several awards, including the Hryhoriy Kochur Literary Prize (2012) for the first Ukrainian translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and the Oleksandr Biletsky Prize (2018) for literary researches.

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AUTHOR

Miguel de Unamuno, 1864–1936, a Spanish philosopher, writer, public figure, professor and rector of the University of Salamanca. His worldview could be classified as an existentialistic one, but he does not attribute himself to any of the schools of thoughtwhich were popular at his time, neither a party in politics, nora genreof literary works. The central theme is the tragedy of human existence torn between being and nothing, eternity and finitude, faith and reason.

WORK

The novel Peace in War (Paz en la guerra) is a novel about the Spanish Civil (Carlist) War. But the war here is rather a metaphor, in the same manner as the siege of the real Bilbao, in which the lives of its inhabitants are passed, is a way to spotlight the human existence. We are dealing not with the official, external history that represents this war as a struggle between “the liberals” and “the royalists”, but with the internal biography of the people, with the narration of suffering and joy, the passionate search for the meaning of life and the experience of death; it is a novel that carries the collective memory of those touched by this war as well as any other one.

TRANSLATOR

Bohdan Chuma (Богдан Чума), born on May 26, 1977 in Lviv, a Ukrainian historian, translator, graduated from the Faculty of History of the Ivan Franko University of Lviv in 1999, was agraduate associate at the universities of Warsaw and Lublin, a fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of the Kingdom of Spain at the ComplutenseUniversity of Madrid. He teaches modern and contemporary history at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Translates works by Lope de Vega, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset and others. 

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AUTHOR

Raymond Queneau, 1903–1976, a French writer, poet, essayist, translator, great illusionist and juggler in the history of French literature. A co-founder of the Experimental Workshop of Potential Literature, staff member of the Gallimard Publishing House and, since 1951, juryman of the Goncourt Literary Prize. The author of the novels Odile, Bluegrass, Zazie in the Metro, The Sunday of Life, The Blue Flowers, The Flight of Icarus and other, collections of verse, researches on the theory of literature.

WORK

We Always Treat Women Too Well (On esttoujors trop bon avec les femmes) is a simple and allusive, chaste and raunchy, heroic and disorderly, silent and noisy, clear and clouded unreal story with unreal characters in real Dublin during the real Easter Rising in 1916. The action takes place in a barricaded post office of Dublin, yet British, when it was occupied by rebels, ready to give their lives for the freedom of their dear Ireland, and mean while a young British postwoman lurkedin the toilet room. Without her, allof thiswould be simple: the honest, pure, brave Irish guys would shoot in the British, and so would beat their path to glory, to Guinness, or to heroic death… But now their names should be not on the front page of the world history, but only on the pages of a literary and translation mystification.

TRANSLATOR

Yaryna Tarasyuk (Ярина Тарасюк), born in 1973 in Lviv, a translator, literary scholar, graduated from the Ivan Franko University of Lviv in 1995 with aspecialization in French language and literature and in 2013 received a Ph. D. She teaches the history of European literature, is a member of the Association Européenne François Mauriac. Her portfolio contains her translations of works by Denys Louis de Rougemont, Anne-Sophie Brasme, Pierre Assouline, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre-Félix Guattari, Bernard Werber.

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AUTHORS

The phenomenon of woman poetic writing was first developed in ancient Greece. At the end of the Hellenistic era, a canon of ancient Greek poetesses was established, including: Sappho, Myrtis, Telesilla, Praxilla, Erinna, Anyte, Moero, Nossis and Corinna. These are poetesses of theseventh — third centuries B. C. In addition, there were poetesses outside the canon: Hedyle, Philinna, Melinno, Julia Balbilla, Caecilia Trebulla, Damo, Cleopatra, Theosebeia and Eudocia Augusta. These are poetesses of the third century B. C. — fifth century C. E. It is known for a certainty only about Sappho who was the priestess of Artemis and leader of the woman religious community in archaic Lesbos (seventh and sixth centuries B. C.) as well as about the Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta (400/401–460).

WORK

First Poetesses: Code ofthe Ancient Greek Woman Poetry is the first complete edition of poetical works by ancient Greek poetesses in Ukrainian translations. Almost 350 texts (fragments) of ancient Greek woman poetry are collected, compiled and commented in the publication, from Sappho to Eudocia Augusta, from the priestess to the empress. Whilecompiling the code, the author (the compiler and translator) had regard not only to the canon of ancient Greek poetesses by Antipater of Thessalonica, on the basis of which Fulvio Orsini compiled the first anthology of ancient Greek woman poetry (Carmina novem illustrium feminarum, 1568), not only to the textological publications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which formed the newest body of ancient Greek poetry (on the basis of the handwritten and epigraphic traditions), but also topapyrus publications — from the first volume of Oxirinh papyruses (1898) to the publication of a papyrus from Green’s collection (2014).

TRANSLATOR

Taras Luchuk (Тарас Лучук), born October 25, 1962 in Lviv, a literary scholar, poet, translator. Graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the Ivan Franko University of Lviv (1985). He specializes in classical philology and Germanistics. A Candidate of Philology. Since 2002, an Associate Professor of the Department of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literary Studiesatthe Ivan Franko University of Lviv. A member of the Association of Ukrainian Writers, author of the poetry collection Everyday Except Today (2002). Scholarship of Fulbright Academic Exchange Programs (2005–2006). He translates from Ancient Greek, Latin, German, and Russian. His portfolio contains his translations of works by Sappho and Alcaeus, Plato and Aristotle, Catullus and Martial, Velimir Khlebnikov and Osip Mandelstam, Johannes Bobrowski and Kito Lorenc, and many other authors.

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AUTHOR

Ursula Poznanski, born on October 30, 1968 in Vienna, an Austrian writer, studied journalism, law and theatrical art at the University of Vienna, worked as an editor in a specialized medical journal. Her novel Erebos, for which she was awarded the German Youth Literature Prize (2010), has brought her popularity asan author of fiction. At present, Ursula Poznanski is considered one of the most successful writers of the youth genre in the German-speaking world. Since recently, she wrote thrillers for adults, too. Foto Gaby Gerster | © Loewe Verlag GmbH

WORK

The action of the thriller Erebos develops at a London School where pupils, in the computer game called Erebos, face very strict rules and tasks that they must perform in real life. At first, sixteen-year-old Nick Dunmore is surprised by the sudden change in behavior and secrecy of some of his classmates, but at last he finds himself in the space of this mysterious computer game, too. The tasks and quests are not only becoming more complex, it turns out that the game knows his friends, his sympathies and fears, and even rewards him for his skill, granting his most courageous desires. But if you lose, then you lose definitively — there is no return to the game. So is it worth to cross your own conscience, to lose friendsfor the game? Where is the boundary between the virtual world and the real one? What is behind Erebos:mysticism or still unknown technology?

TRANSLATOR

Nataliya Snyadanko (Наталія Сняданко), born in 1973 in Lviv, studied at the Faculty of Philology of the Ivan Franko University of Lviv, later studied Romanic Languages and slavistics at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. Works as a journalist for many editions, an editor of the international literary magazine Radar, translated from Polish and German. In 2011, she was awarded the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize. Her portfolio contains her translations of works by Joanna Bator, Zbigniew Herbert, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Christian Tilmann, Günter Grass, Karl May, CzesławMiłosz, Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque.