The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear: Selected Poems

The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear presents poems by Ukrainian poets, the married couple Boris and Lyudmyla Khersonsky, translated from Russian and Ukrainian by the collection’s editors, Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, along with a host of other translators. Many of these vivid poems were inspired, to use Boris Khersonsky’s phrase, by “the muse of crisis,” and though the writing predates the 2022 attack on Ukraine, much in this work now speaks to the catastrophic ongoing war. 

The title poem by Lyudmyla Khersonsky, translated by Grace Mahoney, opens: “in a country where everyone’s name is fear: / it’s good that you don’t see a thing,” and gives way to a recurring motif—don’t see, don’t hear, don’t say, don’t keep—before turning toward a loved one, with poignant instructions fraught with hope for a safe escape:

Blind feet. No looking back. No
looking back. If you look back, my brave:
if my brave, you look back, my brave: you say nothing

Poems, of course, often look back and always speak. In Kaminsky’s introduction, he observes: “[…] the function of language in a time of crisis is especially urgent in Ukraine, where Putin’s invasion began on the pretext of the protection of the sizable Russian-speaking population and their language.” We learn that in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 invasion, Boris, a professor who taught in Russian, decided to begin lecturing in Ukrainian. Both Boris and Lyudmyla, originally among the many Russophone poets in Ukraine, have also recently begun writing poems in Ukrainian.

Boris’s “Explosions are the new normal,” included in two distinct and compelling translations, opens, in Polina Barskova and Ostap Kin’s version, with the observation that “you grow used to” the explosions, and “stop noticing that you, with your ordinary ways, are a goner.” A startling series of perspectival swerves culminates in an intimate and fatalistic address:

a trigger man and a sapper wander around like a couple
as the angel of destruction observes them tenderly from the
     cloud 
we’re captive birds dear brother that’s it that’s all
black sun of melancholy shines like a shrapnel hole