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In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1941 and 2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.
Ostap Kin
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. He translated (with John Hennessy) Yuri Andrukhovych's Set Change, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and Serhiy Zhadan's A New Orthography, and (with Vitaly Chernetsky) Yuri An-drukhovych's Songs for a Dead Rooster. His work appears in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues. He is pursuing a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures at Stanford University.
John Hennessy
Translated by
John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, and more. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of Serhiy Zhadan's award-winning A New Orthography, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond , and Yuri Andrukhovych's Set Change. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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