What We Live For, What We Die For
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Selected Poems
Serhiy Zhadan; Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps; Foreword by Bob Holman
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An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation
“This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Literature Today
“A startling collection of verse.”—Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement
“Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully,” reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world‑renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where “every year there’s less and less air.” Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan’s poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people “will never let it be / like it was before.”
“This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Literature Today
“A startling collection of verse.”—Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement
“Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully,” reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world‑renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where “every year there’s less and less air.” Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan’s poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people “will never let it be / like it was before.”
Serhiy Zhadan, recipient of the 2022 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the 2022 German Peace Prize, is widely considered to be one of the most important young writers in Ukraine. He has received several international literature prizes and has twice won BBC Ukraine’s Book of the Year award. His other books include Mesopotamia and The Orphanage. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps are an award-winning translation team who have been translating Ukrainian poetry since 1989.
“This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Literature Today
“A startling collection of verse.”—Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement
“[Zhadan’s] work has become important to a generation experiencing, simultaneously, war and global interconnectedness . . . With this volume, [translators] Tkacz and Phipps will whet Anglophone readers’ appetites for Zhadan’s poetic engagement with a dangerous, polarized, uncertain world . . . The United States needs a Zhadan as much as Ukraine does.”—Amelia Glaser, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Stunning translations that don’t read like translations, but read as English-language poems . . . When we read this book of poetry we are letting ourselves be part of history being formed.”—Olena Jennings, Ukrainian Weekly
“Undergirding Zhadan’s poetry is a humanitarian desire to improve the physical, cultural, and spiritual conditions in which Ukrainian people live, today and tomorrow . . . Zhadan’s poems reveal the heart and soul of places forgotten, hidden, and unseen, so that we may also witness and understand and remember.”—Kristina Lucenko, Our Life / Nashe Zhyttia
Selected as a 2020 PEN Translation Award Semi-Finalist, sponsored by PEN America Literary Awards
Received honorable mention for the Lois Roth Award, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America
Shortlisted for the Walcott Prize, sponsored by Arrow Press
ISBN: 9780300223361
Publication Date: April 16, 2019
Publication Date: April 16, 2019
160 pages, 6 x 7 3/4
