Discussion
Since the very beginning of Russia’s 2014 invasion, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has triggered explosive growth of contemporary Ukrainian war-themed literature and contributed significantly to the international exposure of Ukrainian authors. The themes of identity negotiation and respective linguistic tensions and shifts during the wartime consistently remain a defining feature of this literary repertoire—and pose specific challenges for the English-language translators. In this presentation, I will explore creative textual and extratextual solutions employed by literary translators and editorial teams in two novels— Olena Stiazhkina’s
Cecil the Lion Had to Die (“Смерть лева Сесіла мала сенс”), translated by Dominique Hoffman, and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s
Mondegreen (
“Мондегрін”), translated by Mark Andryczyk,—to address the resulting cultural complexities and to highlight the translators’ own autonomy and activist self-positioning in their projects.
Both novels centre on the theme of linguistic transition from Russian to Ukrainian as part of Eastern Ukrainians’ negotiation and rediscovery of their fragmented identities in the wake of occupation and displacement, albeit by different means: while Stiazhkina’s text highlights the moments of transition through language code-switching, Rafeyenko focuses on the exploratory side of embracing a new linguistic identity, illustrated by the narrative mode of multilayered linguistic gameplay. I will examine the translators’ strategies in conveying these aspects of the texts through the lens of feminist translation theories (Luise von Flotow, Sherry Simon, Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood), which advocate for innovative translating intrusions on the textual, paratextual, and typographic levels, and multimodality approaches to literary translation (Klaus Kaindl, Gunther Kress, Nina Nørgaard), exploring various modes of perception that frame the readers’ experience of a translated text beyond the written word alone.
My approach intends to demonstrate how non-conventional translation concepts and innovative translating/editorial solutions may become instrumental in ensuring the translators’ more prominent visibility throughout the translated literary works, offering them the space to advocate for their authors and to maximize the cross-cultural reach of Ukrainian war narratives.
