Translation Profession: 21st century

In the 21st century, the tradition of Ukrainian translation was continued, among many others, by Yuri Pokalchuk, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Viktor Morozov.

Yuri Pokalchuk (1941-2008) –  a writer, translator, researcher, and Candidate of Philology born in Kremenets.

Pokalchuk knew 11 foreign languages and was fluent in Polish, English, Spanish, and French. He was the first in the USSR to translate Jorge Luis Borges – the well-known Argentine writer and specialist in culture. Yuri Pokalchuk also translated Americans Ernest Hemingway and Jerome David Salinger, an Argentinean Julio Cortazar, a Brazilian Jorge Amado, and a British Rudyard Kipling. 

Yuri Andrukhovych – a Candidate of Philology, prose writer, essayist, and co-founder of a literary performance group Bu-Ba-Bu, born in Ivano-Frankivsk.

He is the author of the fifth translation into Ukrainian of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and equally famous Romeo and Juliet; the anthology of Ukrainian translations of American poetry of the 1950s-1960s Den’ Smerti Pani Den’ (The Day Lady Died), the Polish works by Tadeusz Konwicki and Bruno Schulz, the German-language authors Rainer Maria Rilke and Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, and the Russians Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Anatoly Kim.

Interestingly, the works of Andrukhovych have been translated into Polish, English, German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, and Esperanto.

The Translation Profession Series will be rounded out with a story of Viktor Morozov, a composer, singer, and translator born in the Ternopil region. Morozov translates from Portuguese and English. From Portuguese, he has translated the famous works by Paulo Coelho Veronika Decides to Die and The Alchemist. His work includes translations of the novels Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway and the book by the English children’s writer Jeremy Strong.

However, all-Ukrainian fame and a special place in the hearts of our readers was brought to Morozov by the translation of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, one of the key works of the 20th century. Morozov’s translation is recognized as one of the best ones in Europe. The translator himself notes that with this translation he attempted to “Ukrainize the young reader”. And he certainly succeeded: “a reading boom among children” literally began in Ukraine. By the way, except for the first novels, all subsequent ones were published before the Russian translations of the “Potteriane”. The Ukrainian translation of the last, seventh book about the young wizard, was the world’s first translation.