Last summer the Harriman Institute partnered with several universities and organizations on the 2024 Translating Ukraine Summer Institute, a two-week international program for established and emerging translators of Ukrainian literature held in Wrocław, Poland.
Mark Andryczyk, who runs the Harriman Institute’s Ukrainian Studies Program, taught at the summer institute. He became a translator out of academic necessity and sat down with me to discuss the evolving field of Ukrainian translation.
Mark Andryczyk: I was teaching Ukrainian literature, and if my students couldn’t read Ukrainian, there were certain works that hadn’t been translated that I really wanted them to read for the class. I said, okay, I want them to have it. And that’s how I became a translator. So, for the next time I taught the class [in 2009], I already had my draft versions of several short stories, poems, all that stuff. Eventually they got published — I’ve been translating steadily since.
Udensiva-Brenner: Is the field so small that you know who all the translators are?
Andryczyk: It used to be. And now it’s grown — I find out about a new translator maybe every month or two.
A big thing is that Harriman, we were one of the major forums for translation of Ukrainian literature into English for years before Maidan.
Udensiva-Brenner: Is that since Russia’s full-scale invasion?
Andryczyk: I would say Maidan [protests at Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti] was a major impetus in 2014, but the full-scale invasion was definitely the impetus for this new crop interested in translating from Ukrainian to English.
But a big thing is that Harriman, we were one of the major forums for translation of Ukrainian literature into English for years before Maidan.
Udensiva-Brenner: Who was doing the translation back then?
Andryczyk: I had this contemporary Ukrainian literature series that went from 2008 to 2016 with the Kennan Institute in Washington. We brought a Ukrainian writer every year to our institutes and presented contemporary Ukrainian literature in English translation. So, we premiered new translations at this event. And these would be excerpts of novels, short stories, poetry.
Udensiva-Brenner: All translated by you?
Andryczyk: Not all translated by me. I would gather what was available, but there was a lot that wasn’t. So, the Harriman was a place where a lot of first translations were inspired because they were needed for this series.
That’s how I published my first anthology, The White Chalk of Days, because I accumulated all these texts—most of them from these events. And the anthology was picked up by Penguin.
Udensiva-Brenner: Tell me more about Translating Ukraine.
Andryczyk: The idea was birthed here at the initiative of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and then partners joined on. Ideally, we’d be holding it in Ukraine, of course, right? But, like a lot of things with Ukrainian culture and academia during the war, it was held in Poland — it’s very close; we have a lot of colleagues who work on Ukraine; there’s a lot of Ukrainians in Poland now.
Udensiva-Brenner: How open are publishers to publishing Ukrainian literature?
Andryczyk: Open like never before. But you know, publishing takes a while. So, going forward, we’re going to see kind of the momentum from the last two-and-a-half years, and then we’ll see how that goes afterwards. Hopefully it’ll continue. ◆
See more about the Translating Ukraine Summer Institute here.
Featured image: Mark Andryczyk (middle, right) working alongside workshop participants in Wrocław, Poland. Photograph by Ali Karakaya
