Rome, at the Colosseum Park an evening of Ukrainian poetry

An evening dedicated to Ukrainian poetry in Rome, at the Colosseum Archaeological Park, which in a renewed sign of support for the Ukrainian people in this difficult historical moment, is promoting Ukraine: poetry in wartime: Ukrainian poems and music with the aim of raising awareness of a still very topical issue. It will take place on Wednesday, June 28, 2023, starting at 9 p.m.: on the stage set up in the cell of the goddess Roma of the Temple of Venus and Rome (pictured) will be the three Ukrainian poets Halyna Kruk, Natalia Beltchenko and Iya Kiva, who will read their poems in Ukrainian while Isabella Mangani will read and recite the corresponding Italian translation. The initiative is dedicated to the key-role of poetry, at a delicate time for Ukraine, aimed at instilling hope and solidarity in its people through culture for the benefit of the country’s present and future.

The artistic director of the evening is Pina Piccolo, a writer, translator and cultural promoter, as well as the editor of the Italian translations of the poems together with Alessandro Achilli. The English translation of the Ukrainian poems is by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuck.

“Promoting an evening dedicated to Ukrainian poetry seemed a fitting act on the part of the Colosseum Archaeological Park as a sign of closeness and solidarity with a people still, more than a year after the Russian invasion, at the center of a tragedy whose end is not in sight,” says Alfonsina Russo, director of the Colosseum Archaeological Park. “Poetry is a very powerful tool of expression that can give voice to resistance and hope for a just peace.”

The poems, interspersed with the performance of musical excerpts by Ukrainian violinist OksanaTiutiunyk and Ukrainian bandurist EKA, touch on themes of high importance in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: from the relationship with nature to the definition of a new identity for the country and its relationship with language, from the search for a profoundly changed everyday life to the paradoxes inherent in a life disrupted by war. Opening the evening (presented by Marina Sorina, translator and interpreter) was Halyna Kruk’s poem written in the aftermath of the tragic destruction of the Kakhovka dam, one of Europe’s largest reservoirs, with serious social, environmental and economic consequences. The award-winning poet and writer emphasizes the theme of poetry as a resistance to the process of dehumanization that the brutality of war can unleash as well as the healing process that will have to be put in place for the entire society at the end of the conflict.

For Natalia Beltchenko, the most lyrical and literary of the three poets and the official translator of Wislawa Szymborska’s work, poetry is a valuable tool for instilling hope and imagining the possibility of action even in the most dramatic contexts. Through her compositions emerges the resilience of the Ukrainian people, destined to breathe new life into the nation, just like spring, capable of regenerating itself even among the rubble of humanity.

At the center of the verses of Iya Kiva, a translator and journalist, are the dramatic consequences of war on the individual and the community; for the Ukrainian poet, poetry is a valuable means of restoring people’s ability to feel, to speak about their emotions. Particularly striking are the poems dedicated to the experience of internal migration, giving voice to the delicate condition of refugees.

The common thread underlying the more than 20 poems recited at the event is, therefore, the value of testimony; poetry perceived not as a mere aesthetic act but as a civil action, as a duty to the future of Ukraine and its people. Book online while places last at https://28giugnopoesia.eventbrite.it

The poets

Natalia Beltchenko (Kiev, 1973) is a Ukrainian poet and translator, a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of the National University of Kiev named after Taras Shevchenko, a member of the Ukrainian PEN Club and the Polish Association of Literary Translators, and the author of nine collections of poetry in Ukrainian. Her poems have been translated into German, French, English, Bulgarian, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Finnish and Danish. Winner of the Hubert Burda Prize (Germany, 2000), she was also awarded the prize for the best translations of Wis�?awa Szymborska’s poetry into Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (Poland, 2015) and the Lesia and Petr Kovalev Prize (USA, 2019). A fellow of the “Gaude Polonia” program of the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland (2017), she was awarded an artistic residency by the Wis�?awa Szymborska Foundation and the Institute of Literature (Kraków, 2022).

Iya Kiva (Donetsk, 1984) is an award-winning poet, translator, journalist and literary critic. She was forced to leave her hometown and move to Kiev in 2014 due to the outbreak of war in the Donbass. She currently lives in Lviv where she continues to write and volunteer in humanitarian projects and resistance to the Russian invasion. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Farther from Paradise(Podal’she ot raya, 2018) and The First Page of Winter(Persha storinka zimy, 2019) both considered among the best books by the PEN Ukraine Association. The same goes for prose production, including �?и п�?окинемос�? �?н�?ими(We Will Wake Up to Others, 2021). He has participated in national and international poetry events and festivals in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Belgium and Finland. She is a fellow of the Ministry of Culture of Poland’s Gaude Poland program (2021) and has been awarded the literary residency “�?н�?здо” (The Nest Residence) in the village of Vytachiv, Kyiv Oblast (2022). As a translator, Kiva participated in the international translation seminars “City of Digital Translators,” a draft program of the German Translation Foundation “TOLEDO” with the support of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (online, 2020) and “T�?umacze bez granic” (Translators without Borders; 2021, Wojnowice, Poland).

Halyna Kruk (1974) is an award-winning poet and writer, translator and scholar from Lviv. She is the author of five collections of poetry, An Adult Woman (2017), Co(una)existence (2013), The Face Behind the Photograph (2005), Travels in Search of a Home (both published in 1997), the short story collection Anyone but Me (2021), and four children’s books, including Marko Travels the World and The Smallest One that have been translated into 15 languages. She is the winner of numerous literary awards in Ukraine, including the Women in the Arts Prize (2023), The Kovaliv Fund Prize (2022) for her prose book Anyone but Me, the BookForum Best Book Prize (2021), the Smoloskyp Poetry Prize, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize, and the Hranoslov Prize. Her works have been translated into numerous languages; her latest collection of poetry A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails has just been published in the United States in a bilingual Ukrainian-English version. Halyna Kruk is a co-creator of multimedia projects, including The BookWar project (in collaboration with electronic musician Yurko Yefremov and singer Halyna Breslavets (2021) and the poetry and music performance The Resistance of Matter (2016). He holds a PhD in Ukrainian Baroque literature (2001) and is an active member of the Ukrainian section of the PEN Association. He lives in Lviv, where he teaches European and Ukrainian Baroque literature at Ivan Franko National University.

Rome, at the Colosseum Park an evening of Ukrainian poetry

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