Two Lands, New Visions: Stories from Canada and Ukraine

 

Two Lands, New Visions / eds. Janice Kulyk Keefer & Solomea Pavlychenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marco Carynnyk & Marta Horban
Regina: Coteau, c1998.
312 p.

I've been continuing to read Ukrainian fiction even though #WITMonth is over. There are many other books by male authors and by a mix of authors that I want to share as well. 

This one is a collection of stories, 10 each from Ukrainian writers and from Ukrainian Canadian writers. It's from the late 90s, so the chosen stories really highlight the themes and style popular in fiction at the time. 

It's quite startling to see the differences; the Ukrainian writers are fabulists, with stories featuring lots of imagination and odd occurrences. They're also looking ahead, and using dark humour, folklore, and a cynical edge to comment on what's happening in their country in oblique ways. The Ukrainian Canadian stories, on the other hand, focus more on the past, looking at family history and how it affects life today. There's a noticeable focus on memory and identity in these stories. 

The stories were collected by two editors: Janice Kulyk Keefer collected the Canadian stories while Solomea Pavlychko chose the Ukrainian ones. Introductory essays by both editors are very helpful to place these stories in context. The translator's notes at the end are also really interesting, looking at local phrases that are specific to a story but hard to translate, and also discussing questions of spelling when moving from the Ukrainian Cyrillic to the English Roman alphabet. 

Two of my favourite authors are included here, Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukr) & Marusya Bociurkiw (Can). And I found a few other stories particularly compelling. I really enjoyed Cold Medicine by Svitlana Kasianova (from Ukraine) which features young seamstresses at a new factory job; the characters were well done and there wasn't too much fabulism in this one. I found that reading so many stories back to back was kind of an overload -- must remember Mavis Gallant's advice to read stories with breaks in between them! 

There were also a couple of Canadian stories that I really enjoyed, one by an author I knew and another by one totally new to me. I've read some work by Mary Borsky, and her story Myna in this collection was really interesting. New to me, and a wonderfully written look at a mother's character is The First Lady by Lida Somchynsky. Both have great writing and are so memorable.

I like collections like this because they give you leads to new authors you may not have known, and show a variety of styles and themes in a certain period of writing. This one was a pretty solid collection, even if it is a bit older, and both the introductory essays and translator's notes added a lot to the reading  experience.