Literary translator Daisy Gibbons explains why cultural work is vital for Ukraine now

Daisy Gibbons is a British translator from Ukrainian, a Cambridge University graduate of 2018, and recently the winner of the Ukrainian Literature in Translation Award from the Ukrainian Institute London. Shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Daisy Gibbons, a British translator who works between English and Ukrainian, decided to make a temporary yet significant career change.

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By that time, after years of study and work, including periods living in Ukraine starting in 2015, she had begun to establish herself as a literary translator. She regularly collaborated with Ukraine’s Osnovy publishing house and translated her first novel in 2020 — the acclaimed “Daughter,” by Tamara Duda.

But, as Ukraine’s very existence was under threat, she, like many Ukrainian writers, decided more direct action was needed, and began working for the Ukrainian army. Details of her work for the ZSU remain confidential, but she has since returned to translation, now with a deeper appreciation of its importance.

“Up until quite recently, I was working with the Ukrainian army, and I didn’t really see my literary translation work as actually that important. But now, I really do understand that it’s vital. Having texts that people have been making in Ukraine for other Ukrainians and having that accessible to people who don’t speak Ukrainian, is really important,” she told Chytomo.

For Gibbons there was something missing from much of the foreign media coverage of the war.

“Something that I found quite frustrating is that everything was written, either by a foreigner going to Ukraine and making some basic points about the country, or by Ukrainians who were trying desperately to tell a story, trying to justify their existence,” she said. “And it’s good to also have cultural production that is not with that aim in mind — not to do with the lens of looking from the outside or the lens of looking outwards, but organic, from within the culture.”

Her dedicated efforts to amplify the voices of Ukrainians speaking on their own terms have not gone unnoticed. The Ukrainian Institute London awarded her the 2023 Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize, with this year’s theme being prose and poetry about Russia’s war on Ukraine.

She earned the accolade for her adept translation of two very distinct works: “Pilates Time,” a poetic, abstract feminist play by Olha Matsiupa, and the wartime diaries of Artem Chekh, a Ukrainian writer turned soldier.

“Artem Chekh’s diaries of his army service are clear-eyed, ironic and skeptical, yet also deeply emotionally involved: Daisy has conveyed their tonal complexity superbly, but also expertly makes the strange realia of the trenches comprehensible to her English-language reader,” the Institute noted. “Olha Matsiupa’s play is a strange, experimental, oblique look at the war whose suggestiveness and ambiguities present a real challenge – but, again, Daisy has trodden the line between clarity and openness of interpretation with great sensitivity.”

Gibbons is now focused on translations of the occupation diaries of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer murdered by Russian forces in the beginning of the war, and ‘Weathering,’ a novel by Artem Chapeye, who, like Chekh, is now serving in the army.

Gibbons emphasized that she sees herself as a “tool” of the authors whose words she translates, and she hopes her efforts help more English language readers connect with contemporary Ukrainian writers, including those who risk their lives every day as volunteers and soldiers.

“Why is that important now? It helps us see that Ukraine has its own culture, language and literature and history that’s very separate from Russia’s. It can draw sharper lines of this being a colonial war,” she said.