Word! The Language Column  How to Translate a National Anthem

Not exactly an everyday task: Ulrike Almut Sandig has translated the Ukrainian national anthem into German in tandem with Claudia Dathe. Not only is it a fine literary rendering, but it’s singable – and it rhymes! She envisions its performance at a concert, free of charge and accessible to one and all, at the border crossing between Poland and Ukraine.

In the previous episode of this trip around the world, we put in a stop to see my fellow poet and musician Grigory Semenchuk in Lviv, over in western Ukraine. Let’s linger in the vicinity and board the time machine of poetry for a dash into the past.

The Ukrainian anthem

Back in 1862, when Ukraine was still little more than an idea germinating in the minds of a handful of intellectuals, an impoverished nobleman’s son, who’d grown up on a farm near Kyiv, wrote a patriotic poem. His name was Pavlo Platonovych Chubynskyi. The poem was published and disseminated throughout the land: owing to its “harmful influence on the minds of the common people”, he was exiled for seven years to the cold northern Russian province of Arkhangelsk.
  But the poem was just as unstoppable as the idea of an autonomous Ukrainian state. It was set to music by Mykhailo Verbytskyi, a Catholic priest, and premiered in the town of Przemyśl three years later. We know the song now as the Ukrainian national anthem.

We look like Ukrainians

Przemyśl, located in the foothills of the Polish Carpathians, is an important border town these days. Civilian flights have been suspended since the Russian invasion, so, after getting their bags and passports checked, travellers from Ukraine change to Polish trains in Przemyśl. The Ukrainian trains are opened one carriage at a time: this nerve-wracking procedure takes hours. On my way home to the EU via Przemyśl last autumn, a friend of mine who happened to be standing behind me in the queue recognized my weary face and remarked, “We look like Ukrainians.”
 

One syllable at a time

Existential threats run through the whole history of Ukraine, which seems to lurch from one attempt at its annihilation to the next. Is this why Ukrainians love their anthem so much? Given my mixed feelings about being German, I can’t help admiring the way they stop whatever they’re doing and pause for a moment whenever they hear the anthem being played.

In early April 2022, as Russia was raining fire on Ukraine, my colleague Claudia Dathe asked me out of the blue whether I could imagine translating the Ukrainian national anthem into German. Dathe is a sought-after translator of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian literature. The director of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, Alexandra Hildebrandt, who’s of Ukrainian descent herself, had pointed out to her that although there were various German translations, none of them was of high literary quality, let alone singable.

So we got down to work. Never before had I spent such a long time translating a single poem – and never been so nervous about it either. In order for the hymn to be sung, not only does the number of syllables have to be just right, but so does the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables. Claudia Dathe translated the Ukrainian original word for word into German, suggesting alternatives and commenting on intonation and specific linguistic features. And after I’d compared every single syllable with the original and with the musical notation, I pieced the whole puzzle together.

Ukrainian original:
Душу й тіло ми положим за нашу свободу,
І покажем, що ми, братття, козацького роду.

Interlinear translation:
Soul and body we give/lay down for our freedom
And show that we, brothers, are of the Cossack nation.

English translation
Body and soul rise on the wind of our freedom,
We’ll prove that we are true children of the Cossacks.

Claudia would call me back when I’d strayed too far from the original, whereupon I’d emend it accordingly and send her the rewrite. It was like doing fine embroidery work. After a month, we’d adapted all three stanzas – in singable form. We’d taken the greatest liberties with the chorus. While body and soul are sacrificed for freedom in the original, they rise on the up-wind of freedom in my German adaptation. and it sounds terrific!

Our German version of the national anthem was premiered on 20 November 2022 at the Literaturhaus Bonn by members of the Bonn Opera Choir: four sopranos (Vardeni Davidian, Christina Kallergis, Jeannette Katzer and Katrin Stösel) and an alto (Simone Degner) accompanied by Joonhee Lee on piano. I think it sounds upbeat – and very Ukrainian.
 

Zukunftsmusik

I dream of the anthem being performed again someday in Przemyśl, with free admission for all travellers and the train crew, for all the Polish and Ukrainian border officials and their families, followed by the inauguration of a brand-new barrier-free border crossing at Przemyśl. Will we get a chance to sing the anthem in German again in the meantime? As a sign of hope for the future and favourable winds.
 

May 2024