Set Change

by Andrukhovych, Yuri; Kin, Ostap; Hennessy, John

• ISBN13: 9781681378848
• ISBN10: 1681378841
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-12-10
• Publisher: NYRB Poets

Summary

The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life.

Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most significant voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, began his career as a poet, producing three collections and two separately published poem cycles in the 1980s and 1990s, the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a time of great political change and artistic revolution. Set Change: Selected Poems presents for the first time in English comprehensive selections from all three collections and both cycles.

In modern Ukrainian letters, Andrukhovych occupies a position similar to the literary giant Nikolai Gogol. While his influence is broad and significant, he is constantly reinventing himself as a writer: his work represents everything playful, free-spirited, and new, and epitomizes all the most original aspects of Ukrainian literature.

The poems collected here showcase the poet’s prolonged quest for a representation of—and response to—the region’s history of violence. In this quest Andrukhovych explores various settings and themes of geography, investigates the shifting borders of Eastern Europe, and invokes a gamut of myths and fantastical elements set in the territory of present-day Ukraine. 

The cornerstone of his poems is a deep fascination with the idea of the city. Andrukhovych’s vivid descriptions lend themselves to his investigations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, two of the city’s most significant aspects. The poet’s deep interest in the baroque, his obsession with verbal play and irony, the elegiac mode, the many hidden as well as overt allusions to other literary works and writers, and the poet’s need for textual experimentation are those elements that make his poems arresting, timely, and perpetually fascinating.

(Translated by the award-winning duo of John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, whose work on this project has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Author Biography

Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist who is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature. He primarily wrote poetry in the early stages of his career and founded the poetical group The Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery). This contribution has led people to credit him with breathing new life into Ukrainian poetry in the mid-1980s. He later turned to prose writing, with his works receiving translations into twenty-two languages. He has received an assortment of national and international awards for his contributions as a writer, intellectual, and cultural theorist, which include the Herder Prize (2001), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2014), and the Goethe Medal (2016).

Ostap Kin is an award-winning translator of Ukranian poetry. He is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukranian Poems on the City, winner of the American Association for Ukranian Studies Prize for Best Translation, and has co-translated numerous books with his collaborator John Hennessy, such as Baby Yar: Ukranian Poets Respond and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography. 

John Hennessy is a poetry editor at The Common and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. He has collaborated with Kin to translate A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and Baby Yar: Ukranian Poets Respond. Hennessy has also published two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims, and his fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.