Glaser Blog Post

    Amelia Glaser's lecture last Friday served as an excellent supplement to the assigned readings for the week. I was particularly interested in her description of her poetry collection project centered around Facebook. Collecting poems written between 2013 and 2022 allowed Glaser to demonstrate how Ukrainian poetry has changed thematically due to the outbreak of war. She took note of linguistic unification as an important development in the types of poetry being shared by Ukrainian poets; prior to the outbreak of war, there was often a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian comments on poems published on Facebook, but the bulk of these comments shifted to almost exclusively Ukrainian once the war began. This seemed like a natural development to me in response to war, as linguistic unification serves to create a sense of Ukrainian camaraderie. Additionally, Glaser noted that many Ukrainian poems began addressing the outside world in response to the war. Poetry became an outlet for people impacted by the ravages of war, and addressing the outside world has allowed Ukrainian poets to bring the war to the attention of the world. These two trends demonstrate the importance of poetry, especially during times of crisis. Glaser's lecture allowed me to understand how language can function as the glue which holds people together. In my opinion, translating these poems into English supports Ukrainian poets' goals of making the war with Russia into a global problem and a global crisis rather than an isolated outbreak of violence in a country halfway around the world. 

    The readings we did in preparation for Glaser's lecture were incredibly impactful. I mentioned this in class, but I'd like to reflect on how the translated stories' form leaves the reader feeling as if they knew the authors in reality. Presenting each account of war without any introduction, without any context, and without a single superfluous sentence throws the reader directly into the authors' experiences. With each story, the reader begins to develop a mental image of a single character: the victim. Though each story is told by difference people, the way they are presented one after the other without even a moment for the reader to catch their breath forces the reader to create a generic character in their mind to sympathize with. My experience reading Glaser's compilation of stories left me feeling as if I had just gone on a journey with a victim of war. However, that single victim represents the entire Ukrainian people. In my opinion, it would be overwhelming to the reader to add meaningless paragraphs on the authors' background or on building up each individual as their own character. It would distract from the central point of each individual story. By solely including brief explanations of individual experiences, the reader is bombarded with only the most impactful moments of each story. This effect leaves the compilation of stories lingering in the readers mind for days after having read it. The entire purpose of creating such a compilation is to remind non-Ukrainian readers that people are actively suffering at the hands of war. I believe that the decisions Glaser made in structuring the compilation itself allowed her to achieve her goal of drilling reality into the minds of her readers, leaving them with lingering thoughts of suffering Ukrainians. 

Alexa