Why Words Matter: Katarzyna Kotyńska on Language, Ukraine & Translation

katarzyna_kotynska_.jpg, default, Katarzyna Kotyńska, photo: Bookforum Lviv

What does it mean to say ‘in Ukraine’ – and why does it matter? We speak with Ukrainian studies specialist and translator Katarzyna Kotyńska about language, literature, and the subtle ways words shape how we understand our neighbours.

AW: Everyone’s talking about Ukraine these days, so it’s important to know how to speak about it: It’s ‘in Ukraine’ [w Ukrainie], not ‘in the Ukraine’ [na Ukrainie]. Why is that so important?

Katarzyna Kotyńska: People from outside the world of a given language are often more sensitive to linguistic nuances which native speakers of the language take for granted. To a foreign ear which approaches the Polish language and culture from the outside, there is a hierarchy of these prepositions. If something is ‘w’ someplace, it suggests a bigger, more important place. In other words, it’s a country without having to spell it out. I won’t deny that I, based on years of habit, often say ‘na Ukrainie’ [in the Ukraine would be the English equivalent – trans. note], but I try when I’m writing to use the forms ‘w Ukrainie’ and ‘do Ukrainy’ precisely because I know how important that is for my Ukrainian friends. It’s a verbal gesture of solidarity and now that it’s become a widely used form, I think that the official, codified norm will follow suit.

AW: You had it right on social media. You said: ‘It’s we who use language; let’s not let language use us’.

KK: Language shapes reality. Language shows how the world is constructed. We don’t know that until we describe it to ourselves. If saying ‘w Ukrainie’ helps us strengthen our awareness of Ukraine as a self-sufficient, independent country, well, then so be it.

AW: How did you come to be a Ukrainian translator?

Book cover for 'Lwów' by Katarzyna Kotyńska. The background is a dusty blue with a graphic pattern of intersecting black power lines or tram wires. A white square in the upper right contains the author's name, the title 'Lwów', and the subtitle 'O odczytywaniu miasta na nowo'. A small icon of a fountain pen nib is featured at the bottom of the label. — Book cover "Lviv. Re-reading the City", author: Katarzyna Kotyńska, 2015, photo: International Cultural Centre

KK: I took Ukrainian studies at Warsaw University, because there were too many students lined up for Russian studies. I decided I didn’t want to fight the crowd… And, less anecdotally, I had spent a couple of years hiking in the Lower Beskid and Bieszczady Mountains where I didn’t understand much of what was going on around me. After a series of logical deductions, I came to the conclusion that Ukrainian studies was probably the subject closest to what I’d need to understand where I am, what I’m seeing and why the world looks like it does.

AW: The Polish and Ukrainian languages are similar. Does that make it easier or harder for a translator? I once spoke with Weronika Gogola, a Slovak translator, who said that paradoxically it’s easier for her to translate from a wholly different language group.

KK: For me, Ukrainian completely ‘wrote over’ my Russian, but that isn’t because of the similarities between Ukrainian and Russian, but rather because of the way I was taught. I’m from the generation that learned Russian all through elementary and high school and I had to make room in my head for Ukrainian.

If we’re talking about the similarity between Ukrainian and Polish, it’s in many ways greater than the mythologized similarity between Ukrainian and Russian. Does that help a translator? Of course. Does it interfere? Well, of course, it interferes. Everything depends on specific examples. Once a person learns to avoid tripping over ‘faux amis’ [‘false friends’ or misleading cognates], her intuition warns that something just isn’t right. That the ‘armatura’ that appears in a Ukrainian text has nothing to do with a faucet [as it does in Polish] and instead simply means a metal reinforcing structure (an armature in English) and a ‘batereja’ - which might be mistaken for a battery – is actually a common radiator.

AW: Are there words in Ukrainian that just don’t translate into other languages? In Polish, we have the word ‘żal’ whose English equivalent, for example, doesn’t quite mean the same thing.

KK: ‘Zacykluwatysia’ is more or less the same as ‘zapętlać się’ or ‘zafiksować’ in Polish [to enter an infinite loop or to fixate on something]. The problem arises in context: you can ‘zacykluwatysia’ on an idea or a thought – a person gets stubborn, holds his own and refuses to budge, gets stuck chasing his tail with no progress. In Polish, you have a number of ways of saying that depending on the specific circumstances. But here in Ukrainian, we have one, elegant, highly descriptive word.

A second Ukrainian word which is perfect in very many contexts is ‘tzilespriamowanyj’. That can be any effort or action – and you can hear it from the word itself – that is directed at achieving a specific goal for which it is thought through, organised and aimed at achieving.

AW: If someone wanted to get to know the Ukrainian mentality, its history, through literature, where should he or she begin?

KK: We have a wide selection of genres, themes, of Ukrainian literature which have been translated into Polish. The problem is with information. It’s difficult enough to just walk into a bookstore and survey these books. You have to know where to dig on the Internet to find them. What can I recommend and what do I suspect might have the broadest potential audience?

Book cover for 'Dom dla Doma' by Wiktoria Amelina. A terracotta-red central panel is set against a green patterned background. In the center is a dark silhouette of a skeleton key. Inside the round handle of the key is a sketch of a dog looking to the left. The author's name and title are printed in dark text on a light green band at the bottom. — Book cover "Dom dla Doma", author: Wiktoria Amelina, photo: Wrocław House of Literature

First of all, my favourite book of the last several years is Victoria Amelina’s Dom’s Dream Kingdom. It’s a story in which various elements are important: Lviv, [author Stanisław] Lem, a poodle, history and identity, all blended together by the author in interesting proportions. It’s a book that is not at all obvious and when we think about the stereotypical Polish view of Lviv (or Lwów), it becomes all the more important to see how Amelina constructs her Lviv.

The second thing is that, precisely a day before the Russian invasion, Oksana Zabuzhko’s book was released: a volume of essays which we had prepared for publication even before the pandemic, Wormwood Planet. Zabuzhko tells about Ukraine from a cultural perspective heavily mixed with politics and history. She also compares it to world culture, at times taking unexpected leaps. She introduces readers to figures and events that, while familiar in Poland, are not typically associated with Ukraine. At one point, she draws a compelling comparison between the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Andrei Tarkovsky, even bringing Lars von Trier into the conversation – a perspective that will resonate with anyone interested in film.

A third book which reads beautifully, but is also important for its subject matter, is one centred on the Russian-Ukrainian war over the Donbas – Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s ‘The Longest Times’. It’s a somewhat grotesque, somewhat suspenseful, somewhat anti-utopian and a bit eerily realistic tale about the wartime reality of the besieged Donbas. There are also mystical, futuristic, and science fictional threads, brilliantly written and translated with bravura.

AW: You mentioned that Oksana Zabuzhko’s book was long in the planning and that its publication took place just when it did and not at some other time. Sometimes texts about a hundred or just a few years ago become more timely than ever in our times than in any other time. I want to refer to what Zabuzhko wrote in her preface to the Polish edition of ‘Wormwood Planet’ about our ‘loss of the ability to use a book as a tool for travelling through time’. Do you think like that about literature?

KK: Oksana Zabuzhko’s comment is very much on target and speaks to the imagination, but I didn’t think about it that way. For me, books, which have accompanied me through life from the moment I began to distinguish letters, are like a gateway to another world. Before the world of books began somehow to connect to this world that I see around me, a lot of time passed. I think it’s a very personal question as to how one sees the encounter with literature, but I just couldn’t function without books.

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Oksana Zabużko, photo: Danuta Matloch / Reporter / East News

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AW: Does this entrance to another world differ for you when you enter the Polish or the Ukrainian world? It seems to me that a translator is, above all, a reader. How do you see your role as a translator?

KK: It’s a little different than people have been saying lately. I understand all my colleagues who have emphasized the role of the translator as a co-author of the book in a sense. I agree with that because, when a translator gets it wrong, there’s hardly any text that could defend itself against that. At the same time, I always think to myself that I’m not here to stand out. I am perhaps a necessary intermediary, but I’m an intermediary all the same. I am a shadow, but one without which the translated object can’t achieve its third dimension.

AW: How do you nuance your language so that you can be true to the original, yet so that the reader can understand your translation?

KK: That’s a point where the closeness of Ukraine and Poland often helps. A closeness of culture and a closeness of language. You have to explain a lot less to a Polish reader of Ukrainian literature than you would to, for instance, an English-language reader and, when you do have to explain something, it’s much easier. For instance, you don’t have to explain to a Polish reader what the Slavic sense of romanticism is. In its Ukrainian version, it has a slightly different colouration, but, all told, we get it. Everything depends on a specific text. This is something I always tell my students: You can write down some general rules, but that will be the notebook that you refer to the least.

AW: Which texts that you’ve translated have remained with you, affected you most?

KK: It’s often the case that just as I finish something that brought me both joy and challenge, something equally compelling soon lands on my desk. Random examples: the Kyiv historian of the 16th and 17th centuries Natalia Yakovenko’s essays about those lands of the Polish Republic which are now within the borders of Ukraine or somewhere along the Polish-Ukrainian border. She writes long, rather Baroque sentences constructed on the basis of multiple examples and allusions. But I had the best time with the names of her characters. On the broadly defined borderlands, these people function in two linguistic worlds at once. Depending on whether they were communicating with their own Russian world or with the official Polish world, they used one or another form of their names. Hrehory or Grzegorz? Sometimes it is a lot of hard work to get to a single name and it requires research.

Translating Sofiya Andruchovych’s Felix Austria was fantastic fun. It’s a book whose action takes place in Stanisławów, today’s Ivano-Frankivsk, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a multicultural and multilingual world: Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Jews. It’s all written in Ukrainian in such a way that you can see from the language itself which part of Ukraine the book is referring to. The Ukrainian language on a daily basis is much more varied than the Polish that we use in official situations. I had to do something to reflect that. The editor Magdalena Petryńska was of great help – she is, after all, an excellent translator – she suggested a few tweaks. We tried to simulate the non-neutrality of the language.

When I finally – with deep regret – parted from Felix Austria, after Natalia Yakovenko, after Oksana Zabuzhko, who was a translating challenge, I didn’t know what else could possibly surprise me… And then – there you go: Viktor Domontovych and his novel Without Foundation. It should appear this year. Domontovych is an author of the 1930s, a psychologising modernist who presents in a fantastic way the reality of the new, immediately post-revolutionary Communist Ukrainian Soviet Republic. What takes place there with language and contexts is a whole separate revelation!

AW: When you hear Oksana Zabuzhko speaking Polish, using neologisms, you can see that she enjoys playing with language.

KK: Oh yes, absolutely! And when you add her complex, allusion-filled sentences, the question becomes: where do you even begin to untangle that intricate web, trace its elements, and weave it back together again? It’s impossible to be bored.

AW: You mentioned Lviv from the perspective of multilingualism. In your book ‘Lviv. Reading the City Anew’, you demonstrate how the myth of the city was differently structured by different nations. The Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish perspectives interrupt each other, sometimes join together and other times they are completely opposed to one another or contradict each other.

KK: I wrote that book because I needed it. It was about seeing Lviv from different angles, in different dimensions. I have in my backpack a Polish story about ‘Polish Lwów, about the baciary [buskers] Szczepko and Tońko’, yet I arrive and find myself in a fantastic Ukrainian city. I started listening to Ukrainian stories about the city. They are structured similarly, they’re just made of different blocks. I wanted to construct them for myself.

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Panoramic view of Lviv, 1901, photo: Polona National Library

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For me, listening to different stories on the same subject, told from different points of view, is important and instructive, even if I don’t learn a lot about the subject of the story. The basic information is the same: that is, in November 1918, Poles and Ukrainians fought over Lviv. Yes. The question is: How is that tale told? How is it remembered? What is the point of telling the story? It’s about setting these stories next to each other, so, when I see how they are constructed and from what components, it’s easier for me to work in that world with those clashing images.

AW: It seems that Lviv is the most often raised issue in our joint history. Are there other Polish-Ukrainian issues that demand that kind of two-sided approach?

KK: Lately, I’ve been up to my ears in the 17th century with which I long ago had a little research romance. We’re working on projects about what historians call the ‘Ukrainian provinces’: Volhynia, Bratslav, Kyiv. It’s a little like the nobility in Yakovenko’s writings: the multiple identities of the story’s characters, the use of different cultural and linguistic effects depending on the situation, seeing things in different contexts. It’s great! Ukrainian historians in recent years have been analysing this legacy in a very interesting manner, exposing all its nuances and variations. As much as this bit of history also interests people in Ukraine who aren’t professional historians, here interest in this period doesn’t extend beyond the tight circle of professional historians.

Naturally, Lviv is the first and probably simplest example of this. It was always a particularly important cultural centre both for Poles and for Ukrainians, so it has a very powerful narrative surrounding it. But some colleagues two years ago did a project about multicultural Humań [Umań] and I served as their translator. It was a fantastic project which also opened my eyes to completely different dimensions of that one city. I hope that people will come to Humań and that I will be able some time to visit the tourist trail that was developed by them calmly in a normal world.

AW: The gestures of solidarity which we see today from people in the cultural community – protests, petitions, boycotts of Russian cultural events – what do they mean to Ukrainians?

KK: As I see it, those gestures are tremendously valued and appreciated. The scale of the support for Ukraine, not only in Poland, is something which right now helps the Ukrainians a lot. They feel that they’re not alone, at least in their heads. And, once fighter planes back that up, it will be even more evident. But, in our professional world of bookworms, all these symbolic gestures, from saying ‘in Ukraine’ and ‘to Ukraine’ to reading Ukrainian books (because they’re amazing!) to inviting Ukrainian curators for a residential scholarship, all that has great significance, too, because there are just so many initiatives of that kind.

Interview originally conducted in Polish, March 2022, translated by Yale Reisner, August 2022

Katarzyna Kotyńska – Ukrainian studies scholar, professor of literature, translator of Ukrainian and Belarusian literature. Researcher at the Slavic Studies Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Winner of the Translation Award of the 2013 Angelus Central European Literary Awards for her translation of Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. Finalist of the first edition of the Ukrainian Drahoman Translators’ Prize in 2021. Author of the book Lviv. Reading the City Anew, whose Ukrainian edition won the Best Book Award in the category “The City” at the ‘Bookforum 2017’ Lviv Book Fair.

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