What Time Is This?

Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) was one of Ukraine’s most significant twentieth-century poets, a prose writer, essayist, and prolific translator from several languages. As a Ukrainian dissident in the Soviet Union, he spent the last thirteen years of his life in prison and the Gulag, where he wrote his magnum opus collection Palimpsests (1980). His other poetry collections include Winter Trees (1970), Joyful Cemetery (1970), and Time of Creativity / Dichtenszeit (1972).

Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar and translator who specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary Ukrainian literature. His translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Apofenie, AGNI, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Two Lines. He is a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (updated 10/2024)

Nina Murray, a Ukrainian-American poet and translator, is the author of the collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) and several chapbooks. Her translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets (Amazon Crossing, 2012) and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (Deep Vellum, 2023). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra (Harvard University Press, 2024) was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022 and toured to Cambridge and Oxford in 2023. (updated 10/2024)