Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on December 7, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Maryana Gudyma. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
Did Russia’s full-scale invasion really make Europe more interested in Ukrainian literature? Or did it simply make Ukraine more visible, while the old ways of reading it stayed in place?
In Spain, Ukrainian literature tends to arrive second-hand: first translated into English, then into Spanish, shaped by decisions made elsewhere. Each step in that relay leaves its mark. A rhythm changes, a cultural reference fades, a voice becomes a little less itself. And Spain is not alone: in Portugal, Italy, and France, the story often looks much the same.
But the challenge, argues translator Maryana Gudyma, is not only linguistic. It is also about the lens through which a culture is read, and how that lens shapes which books get translated, how they are received, and what is quietly left out.
Drawing on her work translating Ukrainian theater and fiction into Spanish, and on her experience with Spanish publishers and universities, Gudyma invites us behind the scenes of literary translation, and asks a simple question: whose stories are we still willing to translate?
Maryana Gudyma is a literary translator and PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Granada, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harriman Institute in Fall 2026. Born in Ukraine and raised in Spain, she is one of the very few Ukrainians in Spain translating literature directly into Spanish, including works by Neda Nezdana and Yuri Andrukhovych, and works actively to bring Ukrainian literature and culture to the Spanish-speaking world. Her doctoral research focuses on literary translation from Ukrainian into Spanish. Using the Ukrainian theater anthology The Unnamed War (2023) as its corpus, it compares its Ukrainian-Spanish and Ukrainian-English translations to develop a framework for translating Ukrainian literature directly into Spanish, a largely unexplored language pair. She is also the founder of Español con Maryana, an online Spanish program for Ukrainian speakers, many of whom moved to Spain during the war. Through her own methodology, students go from zero to speaking Spanish with confidence in six months, helping them integrate into the Spanish-speaking world.
