A collection of poetry about the Babyn Yar tragedy published in the United States

The Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University has published a bilingual collection Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond.

The book collects reflections by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods on the mass executions that took place in Kyiv in September 1941 on the orders of the German occupiers.

The editor, compiler, translator, and author of the foreword was Ostap Kin, who previously published Serhiy Zhadan’s book of poetry, A New Orthography, and Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster. The second translator was John Hennessey, a professor at the University of Massachusetts.

The collection includes poems by Mykola Bazhan, Volodymyr Sosiura, Marta Tarnavska, Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Ivan Drach, Dmytro Pavlychko, Marianna Kiyanovska, and others.

“Written in 1941–2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and timeframes, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond seek to create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site,” the publisher notes.

The book is available on Amazon.

Earlier, the New British publishing house introduced bilingual books for children from Ukraine.

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