Poetry is a time machine that works both ways

[According to Merriam-Webster, memory is ‘the store of things learned and retained from an organism’s activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall and recognition’.]

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Living in Ukraine in the third year of the full-scale war makes us think a lot about memory and remembering, and discuss the ways our tragedy should be commemorated.

In 2024, the topic of the TRANSLATORIUM Literary and Translation Festival we annually organise in Khmelnytskyi (Ukraine) was Translation as a way of remembering.

‘Memory helps us avoid repeating mistakes, build a better future and ultimately contributes to the formation of our identity. Thanks to memory, humanity survives, progresses, and bravely overcomes the various challenges of life’, as we put it in our curatorial text.

‘We’re so tired and have already lost so much that we cannot afford to forget anything’, I said in my opening ceremony speech.

[While, according to the same Merriam-Webster,
Poetry is writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.]

Experience
Emotional response
Concentrated
Experience

My eyes skim through these words again and again. The thing is that poetry can also be a store of things, and with the war in my life, I see it that way more and more. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, I started writing poetry as a diary, as something that could fully capture this whole new life and preserve it for me to remember later. At first, I tried to keep a simple prose diary, but it could explain nothing. I felt those texts were empty, lacking any true feelings I experienced. Everything has been changing so fast, with tonnes of news every day and lots of new unwanted skills and experiences we have accumulated during the past three years. And those poems still take me back to the first days of the war. When I read them in public or just to myself, it’s as if I’m reliving the day I wrote them:

March 16, 2022

they say a habit is formed in 21 days
and that is unfortunately true
what I never wanted to get used to
becomes everyday life
I got used to waking up from a siren
in two seconds
cutting off gas
shutting windows and doors
going to the hallway
not listening attentively
to the noise of aircrafts 
not thinking that one day
it will be theirs
I got used to not going out
without my backpack
and keeping the map of shelters in my head
during the walk

21 times I got lost in time
I lost count of hours
and days
for 21 days I have been getting used

and today
Mariupol happened
and I don’t know how to get used
to this emptiness

(Translated by Ella Yevtushenko)

The Mariupol Drama Theatre with a sign reading ‘Children’, bombed by Russians (photo by Pavel Klimov, Reuters)

At one of our Festival’s events, Ukrainian poet Kateryna Mikhalitsyna said:

‘A poem works like memory. At least for people who work with words. While the news doesn’t work like that, prose texts have a different impact, and poetry is like a time machine’.

So, is poetry a madeleine de Proust? To some extent, I guess. In a way, poetry can give you the key to open the memory box, even if you don’t really want to remember. For Ukrainians, losing memory means losing our identity. This is what Russia has been doing to us for centuries and this is what it is trying to do now. The theatre in Mariupol is now being rebuilt by Russians who occupied the city as if nothing happened at all. According to some resources, they might have left some of the bodies under the rubble without exhumation. This is how they try to make us erase the memory of this tragic event, but we have captured it in poetry and preserved it. And thus, poetry can make it live longer.

 The Mariupol Drama Theater under reconstruction by Russians (photo by Radio Svoboda)

The poem ‘Dima’ by Yurii Bondarchuk is based on the real story of the siege of Mariupol when people were forced to bury their relatives and friends in the most inappropriate places. But even this proves the thriving of our people to preserve memory and avoid oblivion:

To those who care,
who really do, please
find Dima somewhere
and tell him this:

‘Your mother died on the ninth of March.
Your home burnt down then.
I couldn’t help her much.
Dima, I’m so sorry for that.

But I want you to know now
that her death was quick.
And I buried your mum
by the kindergarten, in the trees.

So that you can find her grave,
I’ll send you the map.
Dima, you need to find the strength,
Dima, I love y…’

(Translated by Tania Rodionova)

When translated, such poetry lets us share our cultural and historical memory while at the same time preserving our identity which is facing the threat of erasure. At the same TRANSLATORIUM event, Lithuanian-American poet and translator Rimas Uzhgiris mentioned that we needed translation to present ourselves to the world the way we are so that the world can acknowledge us as we are and so that our memory can last longer in translation. And the more translations we have, the harder it will be to erase or twist our history in the future.

A colleague from Romania recently asked me about the situation with Ukrainian poetry now. I replied that some of the poets were constantly performing and giving speeches abroad, acting as ambassadors of Ukraine and its culture, some were in the Armed Forces and some already dead. We have poetry written in memory of fallen heroes and poetry written by those killed by Russia which now serves as a memento and immortalises them in verse.

As Olena Herasymiuk commented on her recent award-winning poem ‘In the Spring Rain’ for Chytomo:

‘I wrote this piece in memory of my deceased colleagues, those who were to become the foundation of our new-born Ukrainian culture. This song is about our losses, but even after a person perishes physically, memory, warmth and light remain. Words and names remain. There are pieces of art and literature that are now becoming our spiritual weapons. The task of the living is to remember and speak about the artists who sacrificed the most important thing for our freedom, their lives. So that their voices and ideas could still resound for others’.

There is a line in her poem, set to music by the popular Ukrainian band Kryhitka: ‘No one can destroy our memory’. And the more I think of it, the more I realise that, in a way, this is what we’re fighting for. Because memory is not only something in the past, but it is also about our future. Be it bright or not.

Poetry is a time machine that works both ways.