English translation of Italian – Ukrainian poetry collection La guerra è sempre seduta su tutte le sedie (La Vita Felice, 2024). Some of the poems have appeared in English translations in various journals. We provide a list at the end of the article.
Cover art: Inga Levi, Double Exposure, drawing made om 21 April, 2022, 57th day of war.
Preface by Pina Piccolo
Starting from its very title, War is Always Sitting on All the Chairs (Війна заВжди сидить Відразу на Всіх стільцях, La guerra è sempre seduta su tutte le sedie), readers of Iya Kiva’s latest poetry collection cannot ignore the anthropomorphic dimension war assumes in her verse, e.g., war takes on human stances like sitting as well as many others. Translated into Italian by Yuliya Chernyshova and Pina Piccolo with the original Ukrainian text opposite, the poems reveal how war in Ukraine has become an existential issue, both in the life of the young Ukrainian poet and in her poems. It is a process that accompanies her throughout that complex poetic cartography created by these thirty poems selected from her vast production. But just as war becomes anthropomorphized, the reverse process is true as well, human beings are pushed to morphing into war. But luckily there is resistance to such transformation, that is, a pushing back against the dehumanizing tendency that most vividly occurs in the territories struck by occupation and all out war in this historical period. The great power of Iya Kiva’s poetry flows precisely from the tension between these two inverse processes.
Her magnetic verse, marked by a sort of incandescent oddness demand a hearing, especially from those who are baffled by new twenty-first century phenomena and are at a loss for tools to interpret them. Among the alienating elements that characterize our times, we can undoubtedly include hybrid wars, with their great impact on the chain of reception of artistic and literary works. Reflecting on this is an urgent task, as is breaking with convenient ideological formulas or dated poetics that no longer meet the epistemological needs of today. Iya Kiva’s poetry responds to this necessary process of adjustment to reality as do her personal efforts contributing to the international debate, something we are proud to promote with the publication of this collection.
As readers can gather from the five sections composing the collection, this tension between war and resistance is not the fruit of an individual anomaly, a ‘quirk’ contrived by the artist to lend shape to her creative work, but rather mirrors what is happening in the Ukrainian national psyche, particularly after the large-scale invasion of February 24, 2022 by the Russian Federation. War has become ubiquitous for the past three years on a daily basis throughout the country, and in much of the entire life span of Iya Kiva herself, who has undergone the painful experience of internal displacement. Indeed, she has been displaced since 2014 due to her opposition to the early stages of Russian occupation of the Donbas region, and has been forced to wander as a refugee in other Ukrainian cities, first in Kyiv and currently in Lviv. In this respect, readers will be struck by the large number of poems devoted to people who are forced to become refugees abroad or are internally displaced. Two poems are particularly effective in illustrating these life altering processes: [refugees-station] and [refugees-theater] in which the bracketed punctuation provides a visual marker for the refugees’ exclusion from ordinary life experiences; it enshrines their status as subjects suspended from the ‘normal’ reality of citizens experiencing the war in their own homes. From this admittedly unprivileged observatory (“lying on the floor of the theater as a prop”), they are perhaps able to probe things more deeply (in the poem she deploys a powerful metaphor of memory, likened to “a madman, with the razor of anguish in his hand”).
Precisely because of its constant presence reflected in the fabric of the narrative and its lyrical elaboration, war becomes a kind of privileged interlocutor, with whom the poet is in constant dialogue. Iya Kiva does not resort to a single, personal ‘I’ but rather modulates herself in multiple subjectivities ranging from the ‘we‘ that characterizes the poem Hot war comes out of the tap— (“we already stink/ our wives do not want to come to bed with us”), to a more intimate lyrical self, as in cases where she recalls her childhood memories and speaks of Ukrainian cities existing on a double plane, with their bomb shelters of WWWII visited during a field trip lead to the mistaken belief that wars will never return, “then I remembered all the shelters in my city/ as if the little train for children could have adult routes.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, the collection does not travel on the single track of documenting the hegemony of war in human experience, it is also records processes of resistance, both in reality and poetic space, a pushing back against the sedimentation of dehumanizing processes through which the essence of human beings, in their emotions and actions, is absorbed and transformed into war and hatred. The collection, thus, does not record armed resistance, but rather a cultural and psychological one, up against the denial enacted by the aggressor. The poet leads the reader into a tour the force of psychological excavation documenting the difficulty of speech, memory, and motion, all masterfully rendered by words getting stuck, deliberately stuttering anaphora, the recognition of not knowing mirrored in the verse itself, vacillations, the reminder of constant fatigue, collapse, and the desire to fall asleep to escape reality. Next to a poem in which the author seems to answer in a modulated yet linear fashion the question “How do you endure?”, listing the various ways in great detail, we are not surprised to find another poem dominated by a conversation with a ray, almost surrealistically transfigured. After creating a territory of mystery with a large number of symbolic references and unusual metonymies, the poet transports readers to a more subdued daily life by alluding to the weariness that can affect those who endure too long (“we collapse from weariness/ into the abyss of a future that turned out to be not a house but a basement”). The poem then ends in a kind of alliance in which an outside element, the courage of the ray, is transfused in a merciful way, almost as alms-giving, to a despondent, languishing humanity. One among many alliances that transcend rationality, a search for empathy that is lacking in the world of humans.
The deformation of love, the target of distortion by war is among the difficulties recordedby the poet: “as if all of a sudden love had become an artificial language,” or, “so many names tenderness has but more than war people fear/ love.” The reader is alerted to such danger from the very first section of the collection, ending with a terrifying image (“and the wind of ruin screams through the vertebrae of love/ throughout the steppe occupied by the smile of nothingness”). The specific responsibility that befalls the writer is that of keeping alive the awareness of love as a principle to be defended and of human action as an inalienable duty even in the most extreme situations. In this collection, the task of keeping the core of humanity intact, despite difficulties, is explicitly expressed in lines such as: “And to write/ I will not allow the dirt of hatred to settle/ even if only under my fingernails,/ no matter how far the shadows of these days penetrate under my skin,”. Explicitly with regard to Ukrainian writers living inthe country or in diaspora, she references the duty of declining the word ‘war’: “(declining this one word – again and again and again -/ now for Ukrainian writers this is the work of the heart.”
Reading the thirty poems that make up the collection, we sense that war is perched in all possible and imaginable positions, some static others in motion. The reader witnesses war restlessly shifting back and forth throughout the geography of Ukraine as well as in the space of the poems (metaphors of children swimming back and forth between two riverbanks in order not to go mad, or the war transfigured as a game of blindman’s buff). We glimpse war as it exhibits exquisitely human psychological traits such as snickering, bravado, and blackmail. What is most impressive is how in the metaphors used by Iya Kiva, war becomes a kind of negative catalytic agent causing unwelcome mutations in elements of everyday life that should be comforting, such as one’s home or language. And here one must consider the author’s choice to abandon Russian as the language of poetic expression precisely because since the aggression by the Russian Federation, on a metaphorical level, her house has ceased to be her home. For example, in the poem I see my home only in the bombing reports, the poet is irritated to the point of rejecting her house because it won’t acknowledge her identity or presence: “I don’t know if I want to live in a house /t hat doesn’t call me home, / but rather bizarre refuge for words.”
In addition to the varied and rich lexicon with which the author recalls everyday life, time declined in the past, present, and future, memory, and the work world (for example, the evocation of the world of the Donbas mines which belongs to her family’s experience), one must recognize the importance of landscape in the economy of her work. This, too, is characterized by a wealth of imagery and metaphors that shift from a constant presence of frost, ice, and snow as elements of immobility, coercion and stasis to a lush, out of control blooming of wild roses, vines capable even of dislodging trees with their roots, “like icons out of their frame.” Metaphors for the forces of nature that continue their narration and history despite everything. Regenerative forces allied in the poet’s imagery even when she witnesses the ecocide of war, even when the trees raise their branches in surrender, observing it all from a trans-corporeal perspective, in which human beings are decentralized and become part of a transversal and rhizomatic continuity of living and non-living beings, capable of contributing knowledge, change, invisible spells, all components of territories of knowledge and emotion that especially poetry, among literary genres, is called upon to probe.
Pina Piccolo
***
Afterword by Yuliya Chernyshova
I really wish I could write an afterword that is truly after- . The day that Pina Piccolo and I thought we had finally finished most of the work of translating her book, here comes Iya composing yet another poem and posting it on Facebook, following yet another bombardment of Odesa. Unfortunately, we are not at the war’s end yet, we are not in the after- context. Despite our strong desire to take a leap and find ourselves outside the war, reality sucks us in and makes us live inside it. It is an indefinite, borderline space, the nothingness, the afterlife, somewhere between the border and the front and is always on the boundary: “your body never leaves the place of residence –/ that nothingness endlessly bombarded by fury “.
In this space we spend a lot of time living with memories – often memories of the house we left: “once you leave your home, you can no longer find the words for love”. In Iya Kiva’s poems and in the experience of those living this war, the theme of sleep emerges with insistence:
I can’t see what I’m standing on –
I’m just falling asleep
falling asleep
falling asleep
I collapse into sleep
In this undefined, unstable space, characterized by a sense of emptiness, it is difficult to understand what one feels: “I can’t remember what I feel” ; we can’t recognize ourselves: “we read the sacred books and we do not recognize ourselves / neither among the prophets nor among your disciples nor among the apostles” ; loss marks everything, including even yourself as the person you were before the war:
“Isn’t it odd that you travel the same road all your life / just to lose yourself at the first crossroads?”
And in this rambling and unsettling spaces suggesting, on one hand, borderline irrationality, in the psychological sense, and on the other, precisely a sense of the border, poetry becomes indispensable for putting into words the viscous texture of war experiences:
“it’s time to learn new prayers / it’s time to compose poems and ballads / the word is always urgent”
This collection contains mainly poems written during wartime thus posing the problem of finding a thoughtful approach to translate this specific type of poetic writing. Because these are poems written in the imminence of war and/or under the pressure of war events, the poet put her poetic talent to work to put into words what she had never experienced before, a completely new experience, often unspeakable and indescribable. Our translation strategies were, on the one hand, guided by the author’s clearly stated desire that we preserve her choices as much as possible, thus avoid simplification. On the other hand, we were aware that often the lexical, stylistic, grammatical choices, word order, the use of punctuation, uppercase and lowercase letters were at the service of naming aspects of this new reality. Giving a name to what one feels is not such a clearcut process for many people undergoing the experience of war and the poet, with her sensitivity, has the task of setting limits and giving definition to thoughts that have no stable base to hold on to in the chaotic inner world of people devastated by war. In this collection, Iya Kiva lives up to the task, both due to her mastery of poetic language and her ability to modulate a variety of situations.
Many poems illustrate this inability to find words: “the words disappear like water between the fingers” ; “and here you are in front of the empty page of history/without holding any words” up to issuing the following a warning to those standing “in front of the empty page of history”:
stay here and learn to be someone
who knows nothing about language
The search for a language capable of describing this new lived life experience and, correspondingly, the choices made by the poet under the urgent pressures of war, constitute the dominant aspect of this translation. Particular attention, then, had to be paid even to the smallest details, which, at first glance, might have seemed negligible but which, in reality, could not be omitted because they turned out to be part and parcel of the concepts around which Iya Kiva’s poetic narration of this period revolved.
Thus, seemingly cumbersome constructions such as “somewhere here”, “somewhere inside me” could in no way be omitted –as they were the place where the plot of the poem took place, no matter how strange and incomprehensible it may seem:
there in the east, somewhere inside me,
space is covered with the weeds of danger,
somewhere here and in an indistinct elsewhere
Just as paradoxically, the topos is often simultaneously “somewhere here and in an indistinct elsewhere”, the concept of this paradoxical contemporaneity is repeated in many poems in the collection and is of particular importance, even when it refers to places lacking precise boundaries: “the border of this ghetto is transparent like the movement of swifts:/ you can enter it, exit it and enter it again” , both in the description of the war which “is always sitting on all chairs”. In many poems we find a contrast between here and there , above and below , earth and sky , but it is an unusual contrast, intrinsic to a world where everything constitutes a whole. Thus, in the lines: “in the ghetto there is also a river – not meant for drowning (even if that may happen/) but to look at the sky from each and every bank”, ‘the banks’ in reality being not the two we are used to considering, but including the sky and the earth as well, perceived as shores. And this is also the vision provided in the image chosen for the book cover- Inga Levi’s drawing entitled Double exposure- which represents the world where the two realities of peace and war are together, where war overlaps with every reality.
In this world, everything is an ‘if’, and a ‘how’ reflecting the poet’s attempt to give names to experience, as well as her ability to do so only by speaking in similes:
war is like riding a train without a driver
speeding up just like when you draw water from a well
Repetitions also help reproduce the rhythm of the viscous wear and tear of war, which is not lacking for movement but where motion is often like moving in an infernal circle:
we are still and at the same time we move forward we are still and yet we go forward
either under water or perhaps above it
and yet again
I will cross myself
like children crossing the river in the village,
swimming back and forth
just not to go crazy
We also see how the choice of the aspect of the verb (imperfective instead of perfective) can hide an entire world, the wear and tear of a long lasting action (which can be rendered in Italian with the addition of adverbs of time).
people step into puddles because there are no other paths here
but to accept one’s defeat again and again
like the bread at the train station
where volunteers stick in the keys of future lives
We chose repetition to emphasize the concept of “accept again and again ” instead of simply saying “accept ” in order to illustrate that the tragedy of war and its consequences are not accepted just once but await us a thousand times in our long journey.
Such a context of insecurity and lack of definition is marked by the human search for identity where
the war of the war to the war from the war in the war
(decline this one word – again and again and one more time)
now for Ukrainian writers this is the work of the heart
Iya Kiva’s poetry continues to support those who, despite everything, decide to
discover oneself through strength, through a “I can’t do it”
through a “what the hell does it matter”,
to become a conversation for someone, a handshake, a shoulder, a house whisper
while conveying to people who do not have direct experience of war, such as readers of her works in Italian, the difficulty of the times and the various shades of courage of those who, on the other hand, are forced to face it.
Yuliya Chernyshova
Some among the 30 Ukrainian language poems that constitute the collections have been translated and published in English language journals. Here is a list:
https://www.verseville.org/poems-by-iya-kiva.html refugees, theater
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/iya-kiva-a-little-further-from-heaven/ Is there hot war in the tap
https://lithub.com/war-plants-paper-flowers-new-ukrainian-poetry-by-iya-kiva-ostap-slyvynsky-and-halyna-kruk/ memory dries like grass in a summer’s garden
https://www.versopolis.com/poet/467/iya-kiva eight years of saying back home there is a war
https://www.versopolis.com/poet/467/iya-kiva on the unmarked graves of our lives
https://www.versopolis.com/poet/467/iya-kiva somewhere between the ribs a spike appears
Pina Piccolo is a writer and cultural promoter working both in Italy and the USA. She is founder and editor of The Dreaming Machine.
Yuliya Chernishova has a doctorate in Philology from the National University of Kyiv Taras Scevchenko, where she normally teaches, specializing in Italian language, comparative linguistics and translation studies. Since 2022 she is Visiting Professor at the Slavic Literatures department the University of Siena (Italy). She has authored 35 academic articles, and engages in translation, interpreting and research.
