“Nothing is translatable, but you translate anyway, because everything is at stake: understanding what another person is going through.”
—Amelia M. Glaser
Watch this profoundly moving conversation between Griffin Trustee Aleš Šteger and Amelia M. Glaser, Yuliya Ilchuk, and Halyna Kruk, who discuss the creation of their 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection, A Crash Course for Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press). Halyna Kruk speaks about how war has shaped her language and how poetry has helped her survive. Glaser and Ilchuk speak to their process of co-translating Kruk’s work, bending and stretching English “to its limits” in order to “pull out the original feeling” from the Ukrainian poems.
