Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to choose two poems from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

My guest today is the poet and translator of Valjean Mort, whose collection music for the dead and resurrected, won the

2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Roka Prize. Her other honors include a

2021 Rome Prize in Literature and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannin Foundation, and the Amy Clampett Foundation.

Welcome, Valjeana. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

I'm really excited, too, and I love that you picked two translations to read today, one being your own, which is the first we'll hear.

This first poem you've chosen is your translation from the Ukrainian of the poem Testimonyes by

Victoria Amalina, which was published in our August 14th, 2023 issue.

We'll hear you read it in a minute, but first, could you tell us a bit about Amalina and anything

else you might want us to know about this poem?

Yes, I think that in this case, the context is very important, and we are recording right now

at the end of June.

And July 1st will mark a year since Victoria Milina's passing from injuries incurred during a Russian missile attack on the town of Kramatorsk, where she was having lunch with three Colombian colleagues.

Luckily, the three guests survived, but Victoria was injured heavily and she was put on life support and she never gained consciousness.

When in February 22, Russia started bombing Ukraine, Victoria Melina was already a published award-winning novelist, author of a children's book, and also an organizer of a somewhat ironic and fun festival in eastern Ukraine that was previously occupied by Russian military.

It turns out that there is a very small town there called New York.

And when Victoria visited it, she thought that it would be a lot of fun to have the New York literary

festival in this tiny town. That's how she arrived to February 22 when she stopped writing fiction.

And it's not that she picked up writing poetry.

Instead, she received training from a group called Truth Hounds.

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