The ongoing invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army starting February 24, 2022, the resistance by the Ukrainian people as well as the mass killings and displacement and massive destruction throughout the country have generated an international turbulence among intellectuals and artists, with a wide and contrasting array of responses and analyses.
The Italian language La Macchina Sognante has chosen to express solidarity with the resistance of the Ukrainian people by publishing translations of poems and essays written by Ukrainian writers in their country and in diaspora. The reasoning behind this act of cultural solidarity is to help counter the Russian propaganda narrative that the whole country is nazified and must be denazified, to provide readers with nuanced and sophisticated accounts of the issues of language, and linguistic minorities, and more generally to provide readers with a glimpse into that society through its writers.
Since we don’t have a Ukrainian speaking editor that could translate from that language, for the Italian translations La Macchina Sognante has relied on articles published in English by other online journals, mostly based in the US, featuring the work of contemporary Ukrainian writers translated into English. We see this as part of the bridges that need to be built between nations to foster much needed changes and resistance.
Below I provide the links to the poems and articles, the references to the journals where the originally appeared in English translation can be found in each of them:
http://www.lamacchinasognante.com/sullucraina-al-posto-di-una-spiegazione-sisonke-msimang/
