In the Hour of War

You’re tasked with encapsulating the poetry of a country, a crisis, a prospering tradition. You’re allotted 50 poems, tops: Which do you choose? Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky accomplish this taxing, needful task in their anthology In the Hour of War, which gathers English translations of work by 27 contemporary Ukrainian poets. Some poets have U.S. publishers; many more deserve fully annotated facing-page editions. Forché and Kaminsky’s anthology offers an introduction at once far-reaching and approachable: it omits Ukrainian-language originals, keeps notes to a minimum, and unemphatically lists poets and translators after their poems. Read cover to cover, the anthology suggests a collectively authored, multigenerational sequence, a stringing-together of lyric crystals into an ongoing epic of Ukraine.

“The word ‘war’ appears dozens of times in this volume,” Forché and Kaminsky note. The Russo-Ukrainian War—beginning with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, escalating with 2022’s full-scale invasion—is an ungovernable backdrop, but the word “war” is something a poet can work with, raw material to mold and reimagine. “Letters of the alphabet go to war,” Lesyk Panasiuk reports, in Katie Farris and Kaminsky’s translation; in the Ukrainian alphabet, Panasiuk finds a beloved graphic landscape and a perilous materiality: “Through the broken window of / the letter д other countries watch how the letter i / loses its head, how the roof of the letter м / falls through.” For Alex Averbuch (translated by Oksana Maksymchuk), “war” becomes tragic punctuation, the inescapable end of every thought:

trees are budding with war
salty like an explosion — war

fear of famished deserts begotten in us — by war

Poems written decades apart reprise invaluable techniques: full-throated apostrophe, secular prayer, dead-serious anthropomorphism (Ekaterina Derisheva: “houses discuss with each other / where the projectile exploded”). Forché and Kaminsky also treasure unrepeatable oddities, including Viktor Neborak’s “Flying Head”—a gory parable with a speaking severed head—and Aleksandr Kabanov’s “Sniper,” translated by Olga Shvarova: “This is me in love with you as I kill the president.” What all 47 poems share is a frankness with their readers, Ukrainian or otherwise. A dedication by the poet Natalka Bilotserkivets (translated by Michael M. Naydan) could speak for the whole book: “for anyone.”