With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.

Prizes

Winner of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work 2023 (United States),Winner of Peterson Literary Fund Translated Book Award 2023 (United States),Short-listed for AATSEEL Best Translation into English Book Prize 2023 (United States)

There is no doubt that The Voices of Babyn Yar is destined to become a classic text in the Ukrainian canon. Will this poetry save nations or people? Of course not. But it will forever serve as a reminder of the human capacity for evil—a prompt we seem to require on a regular basis. -- Askold Melnyczuk * Times Literary Supplement *
Kiyanovska has collected the imaginary testimony of individuals entwined in these unspeakable atrocities. Now they speak…Paradoxically, because the poems are presented as poetic communications, permeated with interjections from the poet herself, they do not further rend the fabric of reality, but have an utter authenticity that can only be explained by vision. -- Matthew Zapruder * Orion *
In a translation that nudges close to the linguistic breaking points of the original, while retaining the fullness of its poetic registers and plethora of references to Ukrainian, Jewish, Soviet, and Western contexts, the seasoned translators-cum-poets Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky draw attention to an extraordinary work within the literary canon of the Holocaust. -- MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work
In 2017, the poet Marianna Kiyanovska published her collection Babyn Yar: Holosamy. It has now been translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rozochinsky in a virtuosic English version…[The] poems include a discussion of the Nazi genocide, Soviet revisionist history, and recent conversations about identity and citizenship. -- Amelia Glaser * Jewish Renaissance *

Marianna Kiyanovska is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and literary translation and her works have been translated into eighteen languages. She received the 2022 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. In 2020, Kiyanovska was recognized with the prestigious Taras Shevchenko Prize for The Voices of Babyn Yar. She was also awarded the 2013 Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture in Poland. Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. With Max Rosochinsky, she won the first place in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. For the translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’sThe Voices of Babyn Yar (2022), Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky were awarded the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize. Max Rosochinsky is a poet, scholar, and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, and others.