#bilingualism in Ukraine

[russianreader]

Explainer

Source: Ukraine DAO Updates (Telegram), 5 August 2023. Thanks to Monique Camarra (EuroFile) for the heads-up. Intensified air attacks on the Ukrainian capital following a drone strike on the Kremlin that Russia blamed on Kyiv forced Iryna, Svitlana, and Olya to spend their Ukrainian-language transition class in a cafeteria opposite the National Opera instead of the usual venue nearby, which was…

[miaqc1]

Ukraine Drapeau Paix - Images vectorielles gratuites sur Pixabay - Pixabay

Peace for Ukraine. 💛💙

La paix pour l'Ukraine. 💛💙

[editionriedenburg]

Herzlichen Dank an Mag. Dr. Carla Carnevale, Stellv. Leiterin Österreichisches Sprachen-Kompetenz-Zentrum in Graz, für die Aufnahme der drei Deutsch-Ukrainisch Titel auf die Empfehlungsliste „Schule-mehrsprachig.at“. Hier geht es um muttersprachlichen Unterricht an österreichischen Schulen und wir freuen uns, mit * Was brauchst du? * Willi Wunder * Karim auf der Flucht drei exzellente Titel der SOWAS!-Buchreihe von Psychologin Mag. Sigrun Eder ins Klassenzimmer bringen zu dürfen. www.Schule-mehrsprachig.at www.SOWAS-Buch.de #muttersprache #unterricht #bilingual #zweisprachig #grundschule #gymnasium #sprachen #sprache #unterrichtsmaterial #lehrer #lehrerin #grundschullehrerin #ukraine #ukrainisch #deutsch #sprachkompetenz #sprachenzentrum #klassenzimmer #inklusion #sowasbuch #sowasreihe #editionriedenburg https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmd5VJ4LEuS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[tanadrin]

This series of four videos on Ukraine and the Russia-Ukraine conflict is very interesting. The first is basically just a narrative political history of Ukraine from about 2000 to 2014, talking about different political factions that were relevant in the country in the period, and how different internal and external pressures shaped politics. It's very helpful for understanding the Ukrainian political context, including just how recent and just how shallow the supposed tensions between monolingual Russian and bilingual Ukrainian-Russian speakers was in 2014.

The second video is an overview of the Donbass war from 2014-2022, which you might have been vaguely paying attention to at the time. But it's very helpful to have it all laid out in chronological order with the benefit of hindsight, especially due to the obfuscation of Russian operations at the time that made it hard to work out what, exactly, was going on. It's a combination of a good old 19th century-style filibuster (the military expedition, not the parliamentary maneuver), Fox News-style propaganda, and some (rather badly failed) attempts at astroturfing civil unrest--why Russia thought that would work becomes important in Part 4.

Part 3 is just an extended argument that NATO expansion is not relevant to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and while I already agreed with that assessment, it's nice to have it laid out in detail. The very very short version is that by NATO's own public criteria, Ukraine was simply not a candidate to join NATO, and had given up on joining NATO, and that had been painfully obvious since at least the Obama administration. Even more frustratingly, there were multiple points where Russia had an offramp to escalation, where it had gotten everything it could have possibly wanted from the conflict in Donbass, and it refused them all.

Part 4 is the author's attempt to explain why it refused them. The very short explanation is that Russia's government is led by idiots, who are very enamored of a flavor of conspiracy theory that has its origins in the LaRouche movement, and which has been bubbling in both left-wing and right-wing circles since 2000. In this worldview, the US government acting through the CIA (or the British royal family, or George Soros, or Jewish bankers, or whoever your bogeyman of choice is) has an almost supernatural ability to overthrow any government on earth by funding performance art groups (seriously), civil society NGOs, and protestors, and that almost every revolution, actual or so-called, since 1989 has been their direct work, from the post-Soviet revolutions, to Euromaidan, to the Arab Spring.

This belief, in its more overt or fragmentary forms, is incredibly popular, spurred on no doubt by historical instances of CIA malfeasance and actual aggressive wars waged by the Bush administration. But the problem is, it's bunk. During Russia's initial moves against Ukraine in 2014, they tried essentially the same playbook in the Donbass, and of course it failed miserably--you cannot actually astroturf a popular uprising. (The CIA has preferred to stage coups and assassinations, which are a different animal from color revolutions.) The separatists in the Donbass eventually had to be supported by a few thousand Russian troops and direct military aid.

But Putin, driven by his own paranoid misunderstanding of world events, the clique of yes-men he has embedded himself in, and his fear of gay Nazi Jewish CIA agents, simply got Russia in over its head. There is no offramp because Russia cannot articulate what its goals are, and because "stop trying to use George Soros to overthrow the Russian government" is not something the US can agree to, since they are not doing it. The only thing that might have prevented Putin fucking with Ukraine in the first place was maybe if rigging the parliamentary election in 2011 hadn't resulted in protests, in which Putin saw the specter of the hand of the CIA--but of course the US and NATO and the EU had nothing to do with that!

And to cap it all off, since the 2010s the LaRouche movement and its theory of color revolutions has been making inroads in China, so we have that to look forward to in coming decades.

[ohsalome]

Again and again and again I see (mostly) westerners accusing Ukraine of "opressing russian-speaking minority" by our language law (without reading the language law itself, obviously). It really looks like people have some kind of pavlovian reflex to the word "minority", immediately jumping to the assumption that minority = opressed by the majority. But a minority by numbers does not automatically mean minority by power. Billionaires, too, make up a minority of population, does that mean that they are opressed by the majority class? Are gaelige speakers in Ireland priveleged in comparison to the English? Are Elon Musk's white emerald mine owning family opressed by the majority black African population?

For the 1000th time, the relationship between Ukraine and russia is that between colonised and coloniser. It is russian identity, russian language, russian culture, russian world that has been privileged on the territory of ukraine for at least last 400 years. It is ukrainian language, ukrainian culture, ukrainian identity that people have been repressed and killed for.

russian propaganda takes this assumption westerners have about how the world fuctions (minority=oppressed) and uses it to twist the reality. To make you believe that Ukrainians somehow "deserve" to be genocided. To make you believe that it's the best course of action for the West to abandon Ukraine to be raped and plundered by russia. But we can call it "peace", because russians won't allow western journalists to report on it, and we all know that if the west doesn't talk about something, it means it doesn't exist :))))

Here are statistics about the "opression of russian language" from 2012 - during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovich, russian puppet and a literal mafioso [source]:

More than 60% of the total circulation of newspapers, 83% of magazines, and about 87% of books (most of which are imported from Russia) are published in Russian in Ukraine.

In October 2012, only 28% of the prime time on the top 8 TV channels was devoted to Ukrainian-language programs, 44% to Russian-language programs and 28% to bilingual programs.

On the 6 top-rated radio stations, songs in Ukrainian account for only 3.4% of the total number of songs in prime time (last year - 4.6%). At the same time, songs in Russian account for 60% of the total number of songs.

Out of 290 restaurants in 29 cities, only 50% of them have signs in Ukrainian, 46% have menus in Ukrainian, and only 36% have employees who answer Ukrainian to Ukrainian-speaking customers (in another 11%, employees switched to Ukrainian during the conversation).

The "oppression of russian speakers in Ukraine" is nothing but the tyranny of russian chauvinism and imperialism losing its footing. Y'all had no trouble understanding how white ethnonationalists complaining about "the great replacement" is nothing but fear of losing the privilege. Y'all had no trouble understanding that "white cis male is the most opressed person" is a moral panic not grounded in the real power structure of the western society. But in this question, you've decided to ally with the opressor.

[lumilasi]

Guess this is a good way to kick off pride month. I had this scene in mind forever, but having the motivation to draw a comic is always very limited with me, and I still wish I had the patience to make the shading less sloppy. Ah well.

Side note: Mihail speaks Romanian, as he spent most of his human-form life there/considers it his mother tongue despite not actually being born there, so that's the language he's using (saying "yes madam" and "Thanks" if my research is correct. I hope so at least).

(He was born I.E 'manifested' in Ukraine, (TLDR: He's a Grimmhound, they aren't born biologically as they are spirit beings) but lived most of his life in Romania. He still has a Slavic accent, that tends to come through when he's super emotional)

I was kind of uncertain how to include him speaking Romanian in a "natural" way, until I remembered that oh yeah, I'm bilingual too (I keep forgetting it because English is so incredibly common to use in everyday life here lol). So, I kinda thought about how I sometimes use English and Finnish together, and based it on that.

The BG stuff uses photos I've taken, specifically the windows.

(Aiden belongs to my friend @mad-hatter-rici)

[adrianasunderworld]

Okay so I know you posted the "Mc gets turned into a child" a while ago BUT i loved it so i wanted to talk about it more.

Personally, I grew up bouncing between Russia and Ukraine, and since Mc didn't remember anything past age five, imagine this five year old simply not being able to understand, write, or read English and just sobs in an unknown languege.

CHAOS

Some people in the reblogs and replies on that post have had the same thought. Where either they or their Yuus first language is not English, and thus the horror that little five year old them would not know how to communicate and no one would know what they're saying.

I think in the books it's brought up that there's some spell or something on the school that everyone is speaking their native language, but magic makes ot so they understand each other. But that's not as fun as the chaos. So we're gonna disregard that in this instance.

It would also be funny if Yuu is bilingual, but because they're so little they maybe don't know certain words and no one understands what they're asking, because they substitute the word they don't know in English with the word they do know in their other language. I know I used to do that sometimes as a very little kid. Ive always spoken English, but some things when I was very young I only ever used Spanish words for some things until I was a bit older. One example that I remember, is no one I knew growing up ever used the words hair tie or scrunchie. Everyone I knew said Moño. Everyone knew what that was. I didn't know what they were called English until I was much older. So now I'm picturing little Yuu asking for things like that. "Do you have a moño?" And no one knowing what the hell that means.

[tomorrowusa]

Two headlines which help explain the victory of Poland's pro-democracy opposition in Sunday's election...

Opozycja zmobilizowała niegłosujących. Na PiS głosował żelazny elektorat (The opposition mobilized non-voters. An iron electorate voted for PiS)

Stats are preliminary, but voter turnout was around 73% in Sunday's parliamentary election – a post-Communist high. The opposition got out the vote – big time. As many as 31% of the eligible voters who did not vote in the 2019 election voted in this one. Meanwhile, the ruling party whose acronym is PiS tightly held on to its own voters; it wasn't enough for them. 87% of PiS voters had voted in 2019.

Wśród młodych najwięcej stracił PiS (PiS lost most among young people)

Of the five party groupings which won seats in the Sejm, PiS came in fifth among voters under 30. Donald Tusk's Koalicja Obywatelska (KO) came in first and Lewnica came in second. The rigid socially conservative agenda of PiS was regarded as repulsive by many young people in Poland.

But wait, there's more!

One aspect of the youth vote which the second TVN24 article did not emphasize is that women were particularly important in the turnout. This is from a DW article about the defeat of PiS.

High turnout thanks to young and female voters

Observers say young and female voters, motivated by the issue of abortion rights — which the ruling PiS has sought to curtail and Donald Tusk has promised to liberalize — turned out in large numbers to support opposition parties. "Until recently, half of women said they would not vote," sociologist Justyna Kajta of SWPS University in Warsaw told AFP news agency. "Now these exit polls actually show more women than men voted."

From "half of women said they would not vote" to "more women than men voted" shows how decisive increased involvement by women, especially younger women, can be.

During the 2020 demonstrations against the extremist anti-abortion law authored by PiS I saw a sign which this election reminded me of. It displayed a fundamental truth as well as a great bilingual political pun based on a classic song by Bob Marley.

The word kraj is pronounced like the English word cry. In Polish, kraj means country though in certain contexts it tends to refer to Poland in particular. For language nerds, you may recognize it as coming from the same Slavic root as Ukraine (Ukraina as written in Polish).

For a well-functioning country, you need active participation by women in the political process. That happened this week in Poland. ❤️🇵🇱

So massive GOTV and appealing to forward-looking young people had a considerable impact in Poland. Those are lessons which should not be overlooked by center-left parties and coalitions in other countries.

BTW, a second exit poll was released for Sunday's election. It showed the current opposition with 249 seats in the Sejm; that's one more than the earlier poll. But the official results should be available by the middle of the week.

[lexiklecksi]

My top 3 picks for ESC 2024

Dear non-watchers of ESC scroll past, I gotta take a moment to celebrate the ESC on main, so here are my 3 top picks after watching some music videos. I added my unfiltered unhinged thoughts below the music videos.

They blended traditional choir singing with modern hip-hop and folk vocals. The song unfolds in layers, at times it feels like it should be sung in a church. But then the rap vocals bring it into our time. There's a deep sense of longing and cultural history reverberating through the sounds and deep vocals. It is astounding how the brought this song to life, the musical genre mix shouldn't work as well as it does. Ah, I really wish for peace in Ukraine.

I love everything about this! The dance moves, the positive vibes, the catchy tunes and of course the singing and the lyrics! Seems like Vesna started a trend with extra-long braids for ESC performances, and Italy, Luxembourg and Ukraine continue that trend. Tali and Angelina look so similar with the braids, at first I thought they were the same person XD Italian is a beautiful language, and I'm tempted to learn it. But it's only spoken in Italy, and I can already order food in Italian, so that's sufficient.

What a phenomenal, energetic song! I will try to learn the Greek lyrics by heart. I love Athens, such a beautiful city! I visited my godmother there three times and we took trips to see the Akropolis, some temples, the Oracle of Delphi etc. Also I love the irony of the music video making fun of tourists that only see one side of Greece. The stereotypical side is Ancient Greece's history, traditional music and food. Truly, Athens is a vibrant city with an enticing urban culture. I took so many photos of street art and graffiti in Athens. I think it's supposed to be a German tourist, which made me laugh as a German tourist. Then again, my mum is from Cyprus so I grew up bilingual with Greek culture.

[keanuquotes]

Everything Belongs to the Cosmos is an installation of painted works by Los Angeles and Berlin-based painter Alexandra Grant based on texts by Polish writers Anna Adamowicz, Krystyna Dąbrowska, Julia Fiedorczuk, Bianka Rolando, Olga Tokarczuk, and Urszula Zajączkowska. Begun in 2021, the work is designed to create a chapel for reflection and space for hope, following in the rich tradition of contemplative chapel spaces created by artists as diverse as Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Ilise Greenstein and Theaster Gates. The six participating poets were chosen and commissioned in 2021 and early 2022 with the assistance of Marcin Orliński and the contributed work was translated from Polish into English by Antonia-Lloyd Jones.

The curiosity that drives Grant’s career is in literary texts and making them visual. Since 2014, her work has revolved around Sophocles’ myth of Antigone, interpreting her utterance “I was born to love not to hate.” She has painted Antigone’s voice with drawn lines (to represent the rule of law) and bright pours of paint (which capture the chaos of life). In Neunte Universum (Ninth Universe), 2020, painted and exhibited in Berlin in 2021 at carlier | gebauer gallery, her Antigone series expanded to include the universe itself. This painting was technically and culturally a springboard for Everything Belongs to the Cosmos.

The Polish writers featured in Grant’s painted Cosmos span generations and levels of recognition, with Tokarczuk the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature and are meant to highlight the current writing scene in Poland as each interprets an aspect of the cosmos. Taking each writer’s text as a cue, Grant created one large-scale painting based on each text in English, each on paper and at a scale of 3.9 meter tall and 3 meter wide or larger, the largest works she has ever created. The installation of the six paintings is meant to create a chapel space – and quite literally a cosmos – for and of women’s voices.

Engaging the community of Polish writers during the pandemic, the Ukraine war and refugee crisis, as well as the changing political circumstances for women in Poland has allowed for cross-cultural exchange and opens a conversation around the purpose of and hope that writing, art-making, reflection and community can bring. By commissioning the writers and having their work translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Grant’s aim is “to further translate their words into the visible and visual.”

The title of the exhibition captures both a sense of wonder and a surrender to reality and circumstances, which allows for a transcendence of material conditions. Everything Belongs to the Cosmos is a safe haven: a place for reflection and hope, both part of and apart from the chaos of the world.

Grant’s interest in Polish literature began over 20 years ago, when she first read Wislawa Szymborska’s work and embarked on representing the poem “Possibilities” as a drawing without paper, made out of wire, in 2001. These sculptures and works stemming from them are now the subject of a solo show at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw, Poland, Alexandra Grant. Word. Image. Space, a survey of her work that presents a long-term interest in Polish literature and experimental writing, focusing on works inspired by Szymborska and Michael Joyce.

A public conversation led by Lloyd Jones and Marcin Orliński, featuring Adamowicz, Dąbrowska, Fiedorczuk, Rolando, and Zajączkowska, will take place on Saturday, 23 November 2024, at 4 pm.

A bilingual catalog of Everything Belongs to the Cosmos will be released in January 2025. The book will include an essay by Marcin Orliński, as well as the texts by the six Polish writers.

The large-scale paper for the project was provided by Hahnemühle paper.

[mariacallous]

Hashtag museum haul

The canvas tote bag is handmade by artisans from the Bakhmut Creative Workshop, and has a little motanka, an ancient Ukrainian family talismans and a symbol of prosperity, goodness, and hope, per the museum information. (There are a lot more in other colors available through the museum website if you were interested and they help support the craftspeople and artisans from Bakhmut, who have been displaced and scattered throughout Ukraine and elsewhere due to the Russian destruction of their homes.)

The exhibit catalogue is bilingual and has something like 120 works by Prymachenko featured. The two shirts are exclusives from what I can tell. The cards are one of many sets the museum shop had available and now I’ve partially restocked my holiday and thank you stationary.

Oh, and this magnet!

[miaqc1]

Ukraine Drapeau Paix - Images vectorielles gratuites sur Pixabay - Pixabay

Peace for Ukraine 💛💙.

La paix pour l'Ukraine. 💛💙

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Kinship by Maxim D. Shrayer

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/kinship-by-maxim-d-shrayer/

Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author, scholar, and translator, was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family and immigrated to the United States in 1987. A professor at Boston College, Shrayer has authored and edited more than twenty-five books. His recent poetry collections include the Russian-language Stikhi iz aipada (Poems from the iPad, Tel Aviv, 2022) and the English-language Of Politics and Pandemics (Boston, 2020). Among Shrayer’s other books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America, Leaving Russia, and Immigrant Baggage. He is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca, and their silver Jewdle, Stella. #Jewish #Russian #Soviet #poetry #book #history

PRAISE FOR Kinship by Maxim D. Shrayer

“Maxim D. Shrayer‘s new collection radiates the sad airy warmth of a home lost but never forgotten. There is a gentle, inviting glow to the poems, though the light they shed often lands on tragedy. With Kinship, Shrayer has expanded his place in the pantheon of émigré lyricists.”

–Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood, poems and translator of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories.

“In Kinship the poet Maxim D. Shrayer takes on our troubled times—including COVID-19, January 6th, the Russian invasion of Ukraine—as well as troubled past times, gracing these events with his honesty, sorrow, and multi-cultural perspective. Born in Moscow to a Jewish-Russian family, then immigrating to America, Shrayer comes to these moments with sensitivity and a unique eye. He sees bats at sunset as “ugly, soft, and fast/ like old snapshots of the Soviet past,” and understands, even lives, “how time can history backward.” One is wiser for reading these poems, and richer for their beautiful language.”

–Elizabeth Poliner, author of What You Know in Your Hands, poems and As Close to Us as Breathing, a novel

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #read #poetrybook #poems

[drjacquescoulardeau]

TARGOVISTE – NOVEMBER 21-22 & 27-28 – MCDSARE 2023 – ROMANIA

An article published in Psychology Research, David Publishing Company, 3 Germay Dr., Unit 4 #4651, Wilmington DE 19804, USA, https://www.davidpublisher.com/, “300,000 (at Least) Years for Homo Sapiens to Develop Writing: A Review of Silvia Ferrara’s The Greatest Invention, Tr. Todd Portnowitz.“ Then my presentation on Monday, November, 20, 2023 on DISJUNCTURE vs REVOLUTION, POSTGRESSION vs. PROGRESSION, in Romania within the 8th MCDSARE Conference (November 20-28, 2023). The central question of the emergence of language and the passage from oral language to writing will be fundamental. All Information at IFIASA MCDSARE 2023 conference, Boerescu Zaharia, Târgoviște, Dâmbovița, Romania https://www.ifiasa.com/mcdsare-event

First, a video presentation covering the newly discovered Hominin Homo Naledi in South Africa, on the IFIASA site, presents this Hominin who had reached the level of transcribing his oral language into symbolical geometric signs around 300,000 BCE. Compare with Neanderthals who did the same in Gibraltar around 100,000 BCE, and with Homo Sapiens who did it in his European and Indonesian caves around 45,000 BCE. Who is the bad pupil? Who is precocious?

Second, the phylogeny of language from the emergence of oral articulated language to the writing of all languages. Writing is the transfer from oral language to visual engravings or symbols. This will bring up the question of freedom and freedom of choice in archaeological times for Hominins. Did they choose to use their genetic means to develop articulated language, or did they just do it without even thinking about it? Same question about transcribing their oral language into some visual marks, engravings or painted symbols for writing?

The third part on the Versailles Treaty and how it still dictates the present and future of the world will be kept for publication, soon, I hope. It deals with the ferocious consequences of this treaty. Hitler and the second world war. The Holocaust and the creation of Israel, and the impossibility for this state to come to a balanced cooperation with and recognition of the Palestinians. The constant changing camps of Ukraine all along. From 1918 to the early 1920s hostile to the USSR. The vast cooperation with Hitler and the Holocaust under the occupation by Nazi forces. The submissive cooperation with Stalin and the other leaders of the Soviet Union up to 1989. Their independence and the impossibility to live as a bilingual country with two languages, two separate branches of the Orthodox religion, the deep divide between heavy industry and other activities, etc.

All Information at IFIASA MCDSARE 2023 conference, Boerescu Zaharia, Târgoviște, Dâmbovița, Romania https://www.ifiasa.com/mcdsare-event

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

[mavie100moi]

l’heure du Titien … « C’était encore l’heure vespérale que, dans un de ses livres, il avait appelée l’heure du Titien, parce que toutes les choses y resplendissent finalement d’un or très riche, (…), et illuminent le ciel plutôt qu’elles n’en reçoivent la lumière. » — (Gabriele D'Annunzio, Le Feu, 1900)

Cette nuit, j’ai rêvé que des drones ukrainiens survolaient Moscou et larguaient dans le ciel vespéral des tracts à destination de ses habitants. Au réveil, je pensai à l’écrivain italien Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) qui effectua « le 9 août 1918, à la tête de la 87e escadrille de chasse, (…) un vol de plus de mille kilomètres avec son compagnon de vol Aldo Finzi pour larguer au-dessus de Vienne des tracts bilingues rédigés par l'écrivain Ugo Ojetti incitant les Autrichiens à demander l’armistice ». (source: Wikipédia)

Je reprends ici le texte de ce tract de propagande dans lequel j’ai opéré quelques changements: ainsi les Viennois sont-ils devenus des Moscovites, les Italiens des Ukrainiens et les Prussiens des Russes. Quant au drapeau, la transmutation lui aura fait perdre une couleur…

  « Moscovites !

Apprenez à connaître les Ukrainiens. Nous volons au-dessus de Moscou, nous pourrions larguer des tonnes de bombes. Nous ne vous lançons qu'un salut bicolore : les deux couleurs de la liberté. Nous autres Ukrainiens ne faisons pas la guerre aux enfants, aux vieillards et aux femmes. Nous faisons la guerre à votre gouvernement, ennemi de la liberté des nations, à votre gouvernement aveugle, obstiné et cruel, qui ne parvient à vous donner ni la paix, ni le pain, et vous nourrit de haine et d'illusions. Moscovites ! Vous êtes réputés intelligents. Mais pourquoi donc avez-vous revêtu l'uniforme russe ? Vous le voyez, désormais tout le monde est contre vous. Vous voulez continuer la guerre ? Continuez-la, c'est votre suicide. Qu'en attendez-vous ? La victoire décisive que promettent les généraux prussiens ? Leur victoire décisive, c'est comme le pain en Ukraine : on meurt en l'attendant. »

« L'Histoire ne se répète pas, elle bégaie », même dans les rêves à ce qu’il paraît...

[chicago-geniza]

This is from the same girl whose work I've been reading since the war began. Her prose itself, while not strictly Surzhyk, mixes Russian and Ukrainian in a very marked way. She's bilingual and grew up in Moscow, but moved to Ukraine over a decade ago with her partner, who is from the region; she also has relatives there, as many Soviet families do. Her record of wartime as everyday life--which she's requested be translated in real time, into more widely-read "global/world languages"--is the only one I've encountered that doesn't attempt a nationalist language politics, doesn't forcefully impose one over the other; she tries to record the living language of the moment. Sometimes a Ukrainian speaker will switch to Russian in order to ironically emphasize the "kanteslyarit" that certain canned official phrases have become in context, the way circumstance guts and twists connotation, the way the calques and loanwords are no more native, no more sigils of strength if spelled or pronounced slightly differently than they are in the surrounding languages. Anyway here is a conversation with her grandmother, who just died of diabetes; the grandmother's Ukrainian phrases are just as legible in Polish. Idk I have been thinking about how to translate the bilingual texts and the multimodal significations of Ukrainian in them, from pathos to irony to genuine linguistic almost-nationalism to, above all, bilingual code-switching realism in a bilingual place. How do you translate komponentn-visikayt in an online Russian-Ukrainian-Surzhyk diary of the war!