The Fourth Month of Constant Shelling by Lyudmyla Khersonska
A poem from the collection Today is a Different War, translated by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco, read by Ann Leamon
It’s the fourth month of constant shelling.
The world got used to it —
It’s okay to kill and wreck, just not in my
supermarket, my train station.
It’s so hard to live when they’re killing you.
The world leaders
have become agents of war.
Anyone can now kill with impunity.
We were all born just in case
of war. So kill us on the ground,
or — like birds, like dead leaves —
let us fall from a silenced sky.
Anull every law and constitution,
erase all those empty words,
to hell with non-existent rights
if we don’t even have a right to live.
Hide. Don’t go out on the street.
Stop having kids — the soldiers will kill them.
It’s all allowed now. Just please, not
in your supermarket, at your station.
Today is a Different War by Lyudmyla Khersonska
Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what’s in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.”
Purchase here.
Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. In 2022 her joint volume with the poet Boris Khersonsky, her husband, came out in English translation from Lost Horse Press, titled The Country where Everyone’s Name is Fear. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders.
Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin is a co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry (New Meridian Arts Books, 2022).
Andrew Janco’s translations are published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and other journals, and are included in the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. With Olga Livshin, he is the co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry. Andrew works as a digital scholarship programmer at the University of Pennsylvania libraries.
Maya Chhabra’s translations have appeared in The White Review, Cardinal Points, and Poetry Travels. She is the author of a novel in verse, Chiara in the Dark, and several other children’s books including Stranger on the Home Front. Her short stories and original poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, PodCastle, and various anthologies.
Lev Fridman is a speech-language pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writing, translations and reviews have appeared in various publications. He is co-editor of “Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul”: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020).
Reader: Ann Leamon's world includes venture capital research, creative writing, and occasionally adopting dogs. In addition to writing two editions of a textbook and 150 cases for Harvard Business School, she has published in The Lyric, River Teeth, Hole in the Head Review, North Dakota Quarterly, They Call Us…, and The Boston Globe, among others. She holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in German from Dalhousie University, and master’s degrees in Economics from University of Montana and Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and a Corgi-Lab mix.