Word! The Language Column  Sparkling in the Dark

Since they first met in 2015, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Ukrainian poet and musician Grigory Semenchuk have formed a close artistic bond. So what happens to a poem when it gets translated into another language – and turned into a film? Our columnist shows us – and explains why it stars a rabbit.

Back in 2015, shortly before going to the Leipzig Book Fair, I was contacted by a staffer from the Goethe-Institut Ukraine. We met up at Café Telegraph, where she slid a bar of Roshen chocolate across the table to me and told me about her native country (which was still governed at the time by an industrial magnate who happens to own this chocolate brand) in such a captivating way that I felt like going over there straightaway to discover it for myself. So when spring came, I flew to Kyiv.

Concert readings with Grigory Semenchuk

I was asked to improvise a “concert reading” with a performance poet – who also makes electronic music – at a book fair that has been held at Mystetskyi Arsenal, on the grounds of Kyiv’s former citadel, since 2011. We didn’t actually meet till just before the sound check. Grigory Semenchuk, born in 1991, wearing sunglasses, and I, a dozen years older, freezing under my thin apparel, hit it off straightaway. And an hour later, there we were in the Arsenal courtyard giving a concert that people who were there still sometimes ask me about.
  I’ve been going to Ukraine regularly ever since, giving poetry concerts with Grigory. The two of us, along with Sascha Conrad, who’s based in Denmark, form the nucleus of the Landschaft poetry collective, an extended family of musician, artist and translator friends who fuse German and Ukrainian poetry with danceable electronic music and video art. We sing, rap and bob our heads to one another’s verses at clubs and literary festivals and on video recordings.

Grigory Semenchuk is a poet and musician based in Lviv, where he’s also involved in helping the homeless and curating the Authors’ Reading Month festival, an annual literary festival held simultaneously in various Central European cities in July. Grigory’s coming-of-age as a poet coincided with the 2013/2014 Maidan Revolution and the covert invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops – a collective trauma for his generation that infused his early poems.

No way she’ll get through, oh dear, – Hemmed in by ice and snow, I fear

One such poem is on our debut album, which we recorded a few months after our first appearance together in Kyiv. It pictures Vesna, the personification of spring, driving up to the forest in a fancy black Lexus. But the winter woods, covered in deep snow, are indomitable, as if cursed by the Russian Father Frost:
 
Whilst producing our first video in Berlin in 2016, I had a brainwave: to translate the “Spring Woman” as a rabbit scampering through the forest by the Wannsee lakeshore on a winter’s night, searching for someone it can’t find. This is how we translate poems into other languages – as well as into other media. I think the film version, in particular, makes this poem as universal as poetry itself is, in essence. The video has taken on a new meaning to me since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Impossible as it sometimes was for Grigory to enter the EU during the pandemic, now – as in the film – we meet up almost exclusively online. All the same, we manage to write “poetry songs” and shoot new videos with Sascha, to which Grigory contributes via green screen from Lviv. We perform together, too, when possible. And I compose the German renderings of his poems. 

How not to lose your mind

In a new poem of his, someone again turns back after having a look around a city coated in black ice. But this time around, it’s God himself who turn back. So the poem takes his place and undertakes the arduous task of giving solace and strength.
 
An SMS pops up on my phone whilst writing this column. “Hi dear, I am in Chemnitz!” Grigory is coming over the day after tomorrow, and we’ll be eating, drinking and making plans. The war won’t stop us from recording a new album.
 

April 2024