it is forever fascinating to me how many synonyms there are. in the book i've translated (and am still fine-tuning), after puzzling over whether the word "round" can be used without seeming to be wrong, i've come to the conclusion that in the final analysis, nothing is wrong. nothing is wrong because everything is possible. therefore, anything can be round. happiness can be round. happiness is round.

i've been steadfastly working for several years now translating a book written about thirty years ago by a Ukrainian author about traumatized displaced persons. the trauma Ukrainians experienced after living through horrific events well before WWII and including WWII was deep and severe and has been, for the most part, buried and unexpressed. Emma Andiievska has attempted to expose some of that trauma in A NOVEL ABOUT A GOOD PERSON. i can't help being affected by the book, by what happened. here, in peaceful, rural Ohio, in the year 2011, i am affected by current events, too, and it was, at times, difficult to concentrate and to remain committed to actually finish the translation. the point being that nothing has changed. the point being: life in Soviet Ukraine was full of terror; WWII was horrible; but look at what's happening in the world around us today: calamity, grief, terror, horror, and yet again, so many traumatized victims. it all leaves me spent. i just can't hold it. still, i've finished translating the book. i did stay committed to bringing out that sliver of human history and a people's shattered lives. don't those plain and often funny people derserve our admiration? isn't there a profound dignity in having the strenght to remain human through the worst situations? isn't every life valuable? isn't every life worthy, at the very least, of being noticed? isn't it?

[excerpt from A NOVEL ABOUT A GOOD PERSON by Emma Andiievska - translation project in progress. The novel takes place in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany at the end of World War II. A few explanations: the word baba means grandmother or old woman. A plakhta is a skirt woven of two panels connected at the waist, and did means grandfather or old man.] "After all, all kinds of gossip was spread not only about baba Hrytsykha personally but about her plakhta, as well, which she had brought from Ukraine and with which she never parted. And as folks languished, bored, not knowing what to do with themselves as each only waited where in the world fate would now dump him (it took those higher-ups so long to come to a decision that folks lost all hope that things would finally be settled), it so happened that among the talkers there were those who'd been around and who following certain clues were able to establish that baba Hrytsykha's plakhta was not just your run-of-the-mill piece of clothing, but a divining plakhta, handed down from generation to generation, which was why baba never parted with it, and the fact that the plakhta never wore out and the colors never ran, even though baba frequently washed it, with that caustic camp soap, no less, that made the skin peel and after which all colored items needed retouching with dyes bought from bald-headed Ivan, revealed to an experienced eye that it was woven of magic thread. Bald-headed Ivan prepared the dyes himself of bricks, roots growing along the river Isar, and American powdered milk, burning the ingredients into dust in a special kettle - at least, that's what he himself said, pulling wool over our eyes, so as not to disclose the secrets of dye-making that did Okhrym had bestowed upon him. That same did Ohkrym, that camp eccentric, who was already much too old when he arrived at the camp heaven-knows-how (some claimed that kind folks had sheltered him, picking him up in Ukraine somewhere as he was on his way to who-knows-where after his village and all the people in it were burned to the ground while he, who wasn't born yesterday, had miraculously survived, having wandered into a dale while chasing after a lost calf - he eventually made it to camp with those folks), and who once said while tossing off a shot of whiskey that baba Hrytsykha's plakhta chronicled fates from around the world far more accurately and clearly than what has been deciphered from the pyramids or in Michel Nostradamus's prophecies."

translating literature raises so many interesting questions and problems (just as writing does), one of the main ones being: is it wise to translate in a more visceral way, i.e. more spontaneously, in the style of, for example, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xizolu Guo, which actually wasn't translated, but was written in English utilizing non-English syntax. does the more spontaneous translation provide more insight into the "other" culture than does a more glossy, more "worked over" (albeit more readable) translation? and then, which is closer to the truth? because in the final analysis, isn't it truth we're after; isn't it shedding light on something heretofor unknown, something foreign? doesn't presenting a translated work within the Anglo syntax (or context or culture) subtract a significant chunk of something unique, something untranslatable of the native language/culture? or is making a literary text "accessible" the primary objective/focus of translating, ignoring the challenges inherent in trying to understand something foreign by presenting it in its foreigness?