The second book in our "33 Books for Another Belarus" campaign has been published: Ostap Slyvynsky, СЛОЎНІК ВАЙНЫ - DICTIONARY OF WAR. On the website of fototapeta you can download it for free and buy it for 10 Euro.
It was our great wish to also provide a book for the campaign that reports on the war in neighboring Ukraine. We chose Ostap Slyvynsky's book because it brings together a wide range of different voices of refugees who talk about the war up close, as an everyday occurrence and as an event that also affects language. Andreas Rostek, who has already published a German translation of the book, immediately liked the idea and supported its realization at every stage. Zmicier Vishniou from the forced liquidation of the Belarusian publishing house Halijafy also found the idea convincing and took on the work from the Belarusian side. Iryna Herasimovych translated the book from Ukrainian into Belarusian.
The Slavic Department of the University of Zurich supported the translation and printing.
СЛОЎНІК ВАЙНЫ - Dictionary of War
Астап Слівінскі - Ostap Slyvynsky
After the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian poet and translator Ostap Slyvynsky decided to lend his literary voice to the people who fled the war zones and described their experiences to him. He collected voices at the train station in Lviv, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were arriving from eastern Ukraine. Inspired by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who wrote a cycle of poems in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1943 entitled "The World: A Naïve Poem", in which most of the poems are explanations for simple words, Slyvynsky also traces the shifts in meaning of words brought about by the war: "Some meanings become blunt, you have to sharpen them like a knife with a whetstone. Others become so sharp that they are impossible to look at. Some words die and fall away. Some emerge from some past and regain meaning, become important".
Астап Слівінскі нарадзіўся ў 1978 годзе ў Львове, там жа атрымаў вышэйшую адукацыю і жыве цяпер. Паэт, эсэіст, літаратурны крытык, перакладчык, дацэнт Львоўскага ўніверсітэта. Пераклаў на ўкраінскую мову кнігі Вольгі Такарчук, Артура Клінава, Георгія Гаспадзінава, Анджэя Стасюка, Чэслава Мілаша, Уладзіміра Арлова і інш.
Ostap Slyvynsky, born 1978 in Lviv, is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. He has published four volumes of poetry to date, which have been translated into numerous languages. Slyvynsky translates from English, Belarusian, Bulgarian and Polish, most recently Olga Tokarczuk's "Jakobsbücher". In 2017, edition.fotoTAPETA published the poetry collection "Im fünften Jahrtausend erwachen", translated by Claudia Dathe.
Ірына Герасімовіч нарадзілася ў 1978 годзе ў Мінску і з 2009 года займаецца пісьмовым перакладам як фрылансерка. Сябра Нямецкай акадэміі мовы і літаратуры. З 2021 года працуе над дысертацыяй на кафедры славістыкі Цюрыхскага ўніверсітэта ў рамках праекта «Мастацтва і дэзынфармацыя», які падтрымліваецца Швейцарскім нацыянальным навуковым фондам.
Iryna Herasimovich, born in Minsk in 1978, has been a freelance translator since 2009. She has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 2021. Since 2021, she has been a doctoral candidate at the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich in the research project "Arts and Disinformation".