We do no batshit

Dear Reader,?

Out from behind the paywall this week: Oksana Forostyna on Ukrainian humor, in all its translation-defying dimensions—literary history, parody, linguistic power balances, insults, bad manners. It’s an illuminating essay to read in the wake of Volodymyr Zelensky’s European tour the past week. (When Zelensky became president of Ukraine, Forostyna notes, ?one of his former political rivals called him a ‘Maloros’?, an old pejorative for someone loyal to the Russian Empire. The joke was rooted in his comedy career, and ?was a major offense.?)

Plus:

? The European Writers’ Festival this coming weekend;

? What’s currently occupying the ERB’s editors (an aspirationally recurring segment for this newsletter).

?My ghost, we do no batshit?

By Oksana Forostyna

?Few politicians have been so lost and found in translation as Volodymyr Zelensky,? Oksana Forostyna writes, ?and most foreign commentary has failed to grasp the currents of humor from which he sprung.? What makes a joke ?untranslatable?? This essay winds through a few centuries of untranslatable Ukrainian humor, from the parody of the?Aeneid?that founded modern Ukrainian literature in 1798, through the Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture that brought forth the current president.

?It is one of our era’s great ironies that Zelensky has become a global celebrity, addressing Cannes and the Golden Globes, not as a comedy impresario but as the leader of a nation at war, protagonist of a grand drama, the hero of what might be the West’s tragedy. All of his serious speeches and ever-rarer jokes are now perfectly translatable.

To capture the untranslatable means moving between Ukrainian, Russian and Polish literatures. It means glimpsing not only Ukrainian’s comic timing, but also Surzhyk’s. Surzhyk emerges here as a hybrid of Russian and Ukrainian—as a product of, and a punchline to, linguistic power balances over time. (Svetlana Lavochkina has spoken Surzhyk in our pages before.)

When do untranslatable jokes translate into politics? Or into?history?

Good parody is an unpredictable icebreaker. Once you’ve heard a parody of Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy in Surzhyk, you might discover that there are good Ukrainian translations of those august works, and then there are interesting Ukrainian poets, and so on. Eventually you’re an enthusiast for non-conformist Ukrainian culture, visiting Ukrainian concerts and festivals. Two more decades, and you are on Maidan, ready to catch a bullet for Ukraine.

?Read the essay →

European Writers’ Festival

If you find yourself in London this coming weekend, miss the first European Writers’ Festival at the British Library at your own peril. On Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st of May, the festival gathers writers from over 27 countries ??to perform and debate the literature and big ideas defining their countries and Europe today.?? Our contributor?Defne Suman?(look out for more of her work in Issue Four, currently in the works!) will take part in a panel discussion on Writing About History, chaired by Georgina Godwin.?Buy your tickets here.?

What we’re reading / listening to / watching / etc.*

Wiegertje:?Octavia E. Butler’s?Kindred, the novel my fantasy- and science fiction reading group?Maten van Mordor?(Mates of Mordor) selected for this month, about an African-American writer from the Los Angeles of 1976, who time travels to a nineteenth-century Maryland plantation. I’ll save any reflections on the book for my?maten, but overall I’ll file it under: didn’t love it, very glad to have read it.

George:?A pile of student thesis drafts (’tis the season), but meanwhile I’ve been thinking about the great cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who died in March and whose books I’ve brandished with great enthusiasm over the years in the classroom:?The Railway Journey,?The Culture of Defeat,?Three New Deals. Several of his books I haven’t read, as if I’ve been saving them. Nor have I yet read his memoir,?Die andere Seite: Leben und Forschen zwischen New York und Berlin?(2021), but I will.

Sander:?Alba de Céspedes’?Forbidden Notebook?(1951), which has been translated from the Italian and republished across Europe and the US ( PUSHKIN PRESS LIMITED , Astra House . The novel’s protagonist, Valeria Cossati, surprises herself when she starts writing a diary:

?It’s two in the morning. I got up to write: I can’t sleep. Yet again it’s the fault of this notebook. Before, I’d immediately forget what happened at home; now, instead, since I began to write down daily events, I hold on to them in my memory and try to understand why they occurred. If it’s true that the hidden presence of this notebook gives a new flavor to my life, I have to acknowledge that it isn’t making it any happier.

?*We’ll come up with a cleverer name for this eventually.

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