The Tears and Smiles of Things
Inspired by Virgil's exquisitely ambivalent phrase "sunt lacrimae rerum" (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian "voice" of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree's shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora's profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.
This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.
Book Details
- Publisher: Academic Studies Press
- Publish Date: Jan 23rd, 2024
- Pages: 132
- Language: English
- Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
- EAN: 9798887194387
- Categories: • European - Eastern (see also Russian & Soviet)• Essays• Europe - Ukraine
About the Author
Andriy Sodomora is a Ukrainian translator, writer, and professor of Classics at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. His translation oeuvre includes an astounding number of volumes from ancient Greek and Roman authors. At the age of 85, Sodomora remains extremely prolific, successfully combining translation and creative writing.
Roman Ivashkiv is assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama. He researches transmesis (i.e., fictional representation of translation and translators) in contemporary Ukrainian literature. With Canadian writer Erín Moure, he published an English translation of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Izdryk's poetry collection entitled Smokes (2019).
Sabrina Jaszi is a translator and writer. She co-founded Turkoslavia, a translators collective and journal or Turkic and Slavic literature, and is finishing a dissertation on Soviet Uzbek literature at UC Berkeley. In 2022, she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in literary translation.
Markiyan Dombrovskyi is a Ukrainian classical philologist at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He researches classical literature (works on Latin elegy, especially Tibullus, Greek epigram etc), as well as Neo-Latin epigraphy in Ukraine. He also translates early modern Ukrainian historical sources written in Latin.