Amelia Glaser's The Shadow Theater

Lia Galván 

I found the texts that we read in preparation for this week's lecture absolutely moving. Vocabulary of War and the poem “Our Newsfeed is a Gallery of Loss” especially stuck with me since they show how war affects absolutely every aspect of life including our relationship with language. In Vocabulary of War, the juxtaposition of simple and mundane words such as "apple", "bathtub", and "star" with the heartbreaking stories that follow creates a powerful emotional effect that makes evident how language reflects and constructs our reality. The texts also made me question what is the role of beauty, poetry, literature, and, of course, translation in contexts such as this one since as Iya Kiva states: “no metaphors work against an armed soldier.”

Glaser’s lecture and project on digital humanities were extremely valuable for me to shed light on how to approach the role of literature and translation in such violent contexts. I thought it was very important that Glaser emphasized that as translators and, simply, as people who don’t live in Ukraine, we need to acknowledge that our understanding is mediated by several filters– in the end, we are only able to see the shadows in Plato’s cave. Glaser’s project of monitoring poets and poetry in real-time through Facebook is a way to acknowledge said mediation, and, at the same time, it allows her as a translator to be the closest she can be to those poets’ voices. Her project also displays that there is a large active community of Ukrainian poets who turn to social media to document and report their own experiences of war. The comments to those posts are often translations to several languages or more poems which shows the power that poetry has to connect people.


Glaser’s lecture highlighted how translation and “surrendering” to the other’s voice can be a way of fostering empathy and understanding between communities, especially through difficult times. That, of course, doesn’t mean that poetry would stop a soldier, but it shows how even in violent contexts it is a medium that allows for expression, criticism, and even humor and its translation can create connections to those experiences across the globe. 

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