Serhiy Zhadan (I) — [All day the sea advances and withdraws]

Description: 

Serhiy Zhadan (1974 –) was born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast, and is one of Ukraine’s most revered cultural figures. He is a poet, prose writer, rock musician, translator, and essayist, regarded as the voice of his generation and now residing in Kharkiv. Zhadan’s body of work spans three decades, and often gives voice to the people of the borderland provinces of the Donbas region, now largely illegally occupied by Russian military forces. In May 2024, he enlisted in a local National Guard brigade in Kharkiv.

In an article for The New York Times later that same year was published this excerpt of his recent work, translated by Virlana Tkacz and and Wanda Phipps:

The only rule – grow roots,
Break through.
The only chance – reach out for a branch, grab hold of a voice.
There is nothing else.
No one will remember you for your silence.
No one but you can name the rivers nearby.

The water and sea occupy a powerful symbolic function across his work – operating as a site of infinite expanse, intense feeling, and personal and historical reckoning. It is also a container (and transmitter) of memory, shipwrecked vessels, and uncountable grains of sand.


Excerpt:

All day the sea advances and withdraws, 

hurling its gulls like napkins at a waiter.

All day she laments and scolds, 

pities herself, scorns herself. 

All day the briny water turns over in its helplessness. 

All day the sand settles upon the sea’s palate. 

All day she paces the shore, 

fiercely trampling the sodden newsprint sheets of sand. 

She sits at the water’s edge, 

reckoning with the anger in herself. 

And the sea as well – 

sits, reckoning with the ships in itself.

Explanation:

Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan’s [all day the sea advances and withdraws] (2016) presents the sea as a complex and living force, illustrated in uncertain synchronicity the female subject, who “all day…laments and scolds,/ pities herself, scorns herself.” Processes of human introspection, historical reckoning, and deconstruction are here aligned with the sea, “reckoning with the ships in itself.” The littoral boundary, and distance between human and natural worlds, is thus miniaturized, accentuated as a location both generative and destructive.