Amelia Glaser, Professor, Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies, University of California San Diego

“In a metaphor that folds like a Swiss Army knife,” wrote Halyna Kruk in a 2020 poem, “the corkscrew broke, the file got dull.” Since the 2014 outbreak of war in Donbas, Ukrainian poets have sought new images to describe Ukraine’s devastated infrastructure and displaced citizens in verse, often posting their work on social media alongside updates and news articles. This rapidly changing online artistic corpus reveals how the war in Ukraine has affected the figurative language of Ukrainian poetry. As the Polish philosopher Józef Tischner has argued, metaphor is a way of expressing empathy, of bridging gaps between people and experiences. Drawing from an archive of poems shared on Facebook over the past decade, Dr. Amelia Glaser will discuss how war and upheaval in Ukraine has yielded new analogies for the country and its citizens.

Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She translates from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Most recently, she translated, together with Yuliya Ilchuk, a book of collected poems by the Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails. She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

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Image: Khrystyna Valko.