Kateryna Kalytko — [They were singing a folk song]
Kateryna Kalytko (1982 –) was born in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, and is renowned as a poet and translator. Her poetry, in the words of her translators Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyna (whose poetry is also featured in this collection), intricately interweaves images of beauty and violence in a dense and emotionally charged reflection upon her surrounding world, and upon the experience of Russian military invasion in 2014 and 2022. Exploring themes of dislocation, departure, change, and violence, she explores, across her poetic landscape, the experience of “becoming a refugee in search of a shelter, and of identity at the time of war.”
In the introduction to her 2022 collection Nobody Knows Us Here, And We Don’t Know Anyone, Jennings and Lutsyshyna write: “the liminal space where the shoreline meets the water is perhaps the best metaphor of Kalytko’s poetry, as well as her prose: the ever changing strip of land and waves that come forth and retreat unpredictably, leaving the grass and stones wet under the scorching sun.” Whilst her poetry explores the severance of personal, linguistic, and national connective threads, it also searches for the possibility of repair.
Excerpt:
They were singing a folk song.
The language broke at the folds
and the shards sparkled like coal. The throat prickled,
as if people were calling the someone who would not come,
who had never come yet.
And I wanted to cry and to join them,
so that my lungs would break from my chest: two boats — let's say,
Tenderness and Longing, froze near the wharf.
They could not sail off, moored to this chilly air
by the larynx and trachea.
I wanted to cry and to escape,
to leave, not wasting time, far away, never to return,
-and when at the border they ask, "What is in your luggage?"
I open the bag with ringing fragments
and I cannot explain what broke.
All the words have flown out
into an enduring winter song.
Explanation:
Ukrainian poet Kateryna Kalytko’s [They were singing a folk song] (2019) draws powerfully and viscerally upon the littoral space as a means of articulating Ukrainian experiences of Russian full-scale invasion, and violence in its multiplicity of forms. Here, she illustrates a breakdown in frameworks of human connection, made visible via the loss of language. In this poem, both of the speaker’s lungs, and feelings of tenderness and longing, are painted as frozen to an ambiguous wharf, “moored to this chilly air/ by the larynx and trachea” (two body parts essential for speech). Kalytko’s speaker is dislocated, forced to abandon or endure the shattering of language and erosion of frameworks of identity through which we attach, or associate ourselves to physical space. After crossing this poetic sea – reflective of a period of radical transition and endurance of violent upheaval – all that remains of her luggage (language) are “ringing fragments”, although, of course, she “cannot explain what broke.”
Citation: Kalytko, Kateryna. Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone. Trans. Oksana Lutsyshyna and Olena Jennings, Lost Horse Press, 2022, pp. 15.