Translating the Language of Death
Poetry Reading by Iya Kiva, poet, translator, and journalist living in Kyiv, Ukraine
Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
This bilingual reading will feature Iya Kiva, a Ukrainian poet, translator, and journalist who left her native Donetsk when war broke out in 2014 against Russia-backed separatists. At that time, Kiva also shifted from writing in Russian to writing in Ukrainian. Kiva’s critically acclaimed poetry has been translated into numerous languages. Kiva has long written about the act of translation as a process for understanding her own, and her country’s, diverse linguistic and ethnic history. Her poetic personae wander Ukraine, where they visit unfamiliar cemeteries “translating the language of death,” and mix up streets "like words in related languages”. A bilingual collection of Iya’s poetry, translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, is currently in press with Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, distributed by Harvard University Press.
Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist living in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Further from Heaven (Podal’she ot raya, 2018) and The First Page of Winter (Persha storinka zimy, 2019). Her poems have been translated into more than 30 languages and awarded nationally and internationally. She translates Polish and Belarusian poetry and contributes to the PJ Library program in Ukraine as an editor and a translator of children’s books from the English. In the fall of 2023, she is the writer in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the weekly Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.