Note to Ostap Slyvinsky's poem
The loneliness of the victims. This is the new Campo di Fiori. Another pyre raised for heretics of the blunt force of the empire and the reason legitimized by enslavement. Ukrainians have experienced a lot of solidarity in the world. But it is not enough to prevent them from feeling alone. Political or military abandonment – they are not final, they can be negotiated and, at least partially, prevented. However, there is another kind of abandonment – the otherness of being a victim and, consequently, the loneliness of experiencing the truth about violence and war. The death of loved ones hurts, as does hunger, destruction and vagrancy, but equally, and sometimes more – yes, really – the loneliness in truth hurts. The world, and therefore we/I, may have the best intentions, may listen to its own reasoning, may say that nothing is black and white, may repeat the eternal mantra about peace and that humanists should stay away from weapons... And it will never even cross its mind that it may be hurting the victims of war and making their loneliness deeper.
What can be done about it? More than one thing. Every form of solidarity and help is essential. And it is important to understand that military aid in Ukraine is not a separate form of support, but part of humanitarian aid, which determines the existential to be or not to be. I know that this may conflict with the reasoning of many, as it did with mine. But this is precisely the moment when we can break through the loneliness of the victims, or at least radically get closer to them. Yes, sometimes at the cost of breaking through ourselves. I understood this in besieged Sarajevo. The killing of thousands of its inhabitants lasted three years, accompanied by a global orchestra of voices convincing us that our humanitarianism should stop at feeding the victims. Once you embrace the loneliness of the dying, you will not part with it for the rest of your life and you will look at the world through different eyes. And with each escalation of violence, before giving voice to their own arguments, they will try to listen to the voice of the victim. Perhaps this is the most we can do to break their loneliness – to give voice to the violated and killed, to open ourselves to the truth of the heretics of the enslaved mind.
“Those dying here, the lonely, / forgotten by the world, / our tongue become for them / the language of an ancient planet.” All is not yet lost. We can still fight to make their language understandable to us. And thus change our speech, so painfully foreign to the innocently perishing. Unlike Czesław Miłosz, who wrote the poem Campo di Fiori outside the walls of the Warsaw ghetto, Ostap Slyvynski writes the poem What is war from inside Ukraine. There are many differences between the circumstances of the two, but one thing they have in common is the loneliness of the victims and the frighteningly unshakable persistence of those who “always know better”. Meanwhile, our people -to-people persistence, which in the face of the rising tide of darkness seems like a miracle to us once again, is still possible. For we are still able to overcome ourselves, to transcend our own powerlessness, and, to use the Ukrainian expression peremohty, to add a few pages of truth of the lonely to the textbooks printed without their co-authorship.
I am providing my own translation of the poem written by Ostap Slivinsky at the beginning of this year.
WHAT IS WAR
Someday they may decide to write such a textbook
but we won't be invited as co-authors
because others always know better what war is
because others always know better
all right
but one chapter
one chapter give it to us
you won't find any further reading anyway
this will be the chapter on silence
who hasn't been to war doesn't know what silence is
or maybe they do
and we don't know
as fish do not know about the water that feeds them and the oil that kills them
as the vole mouse doesn't know about the darkness that hides it from the kingfisher but
it also hides the kingfisher
let us write this chapter
i know you're afraid of blood so we'll write it with water
water that the wounded man asked for when he couldn't swallow anymore and just
stared at it
water that flowed through a broken roof
water that can be used instead of tears
yes - we will come to you with water
we will not leave any indelible marks
on your slogans and values that we have misused
and now you don't know how to show to your children anymore
these will be our few pages
and only a few will know that they are not empty
translated by Krzysztof Czyżewski