LitFest 2025: Translation Slam (Ukrainian) with Author Volodymyr Rafeyenko & Translators Mark Andryczyk, Dominique Hoffman & Halyna Hryn

Three translations enter. One translation leaves.

City of Asylum is back with its third official Translation Slam! The slam is a thrilling phenomenon in which renowned translators compete to see who can produce the best translation from the same source material. The source material is provided to the translators in advance, but the true battle of wits begins on stage at the slam, when the translators present and defend their work under the scrutiny of the author, the emcee, and the audience. 

The magic of the slam lies in the truth that literary translation is an art form—not an exact science. Interpretations of a singular text are plentiful, and no two translators will interact with a text in exactly the same way. In this program, City of Asylum Writer-in-Residence Volodymyr Rafeyenko has supplied a 600-word essay in Ukrainian, which has been shared with literary translators Mark Andryczyk (who has worked on several of Volodymyr’s literary projects), Dominique Hoffman, and Halyna Hryn (who will both take in Volodymyr’s work with fresh eyes).

These experts in Ukrainian-to-English translation will prepare their interpretations ahead of time and then go head-to-head live at the slam, revealing their respective translations to the audience and to Volodymyr. At this point, our translators will defend their work under the scrutiny of the author, the audience, and our moderator, Rania Mamoun. 

Their defenses and discussion will cover differences in word choice, the influence of translation on reader interpretation, their translation process and reasoning, and what’s lost and gained in the art of translation. 

The slam will be followed by an audience Q&A. English/Ukrainian live interpretation will be provided by Myloslava Zavhorodnia.

About the Author:

Volodymyr Rafeyenko is an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic from Kyiv, Ukraine. He graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies. From 1992 to 2018, he wrote his works in Russian, was mainly published in Russia, and was considered a representative of Russian literature. Following the outbreak of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Volodymyr left Donetsk and moved to a town near Kyiv, where he wrote Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, his first novel in the Ukrainian language, which was shortlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s highest award in arts and culture. Volodymyr learned Ukrainian from scratch and has dedicated himself to speaking Ukrainian, rather than Russian, his mother tongue, as an act of resistance and perseverance. Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize for the novel Brief Farewell Book (1999) and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award for the novel The Length of Days (2017). Volodymyr’s prose is full of phantasmagorical images and storylines, as well as explicit and implicit allusions to well-known texts. He is sometimes called the “magical postmodernist” due to the intertextuality and richness of his prose. He is a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum with his wife, Olesia Rafeyenko, since June 2023.

About the Translators:

Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He has a PhD in Ukrainian Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). His monograph The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Andryczyk is editor, compiler, and a translator of The White Chalk of Days, the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017)—republished by Penguin in 2022 as Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965. He has translated eleven essays by Yuri Andrukhovych for the award-winning publication My Final Territory: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is the translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022) and the editor, compiler, and a translator of Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War (Penguin, 2023).

A translator from Ukrainian and Russian, Dominique Hoffman holds a degree in Russian history and a doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has taught courses in language, history, and culture. Her translations include fiction, scientific, art, and historical publications such as Yaroslav Hrytsak’s The Forging of a Nation, Olena Stiazhkina’s Cecil the Lion Had to Die, and Oleksii Nikitin’s In the Face of Fire, among others.

Halyna Hryn is editor of Harvard Ukrainian Studies. She has published on Soviet Ukrainian literature and cultural politics of the 1920s–1930s and is the editor of two volumes on the Ukrainian famine: Hunger by Design (2008) and After the Holodomor (coedited, 2013). Her translations include several novels by Oksana Zabuzhko (Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex) and Volodymyr Dibrova.

About the Moderator:

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese activist and bestselling writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She completed Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry manuscript written during the COVID-19 quarantine, translated into English by Yasmine Seale and published by Action Books in March 2023. Rania has published two novels to great international acclaim, Green Flash and Son of the Sun, and Thirteen Months of Sunrise, a short story collection that was shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Rania continues to organize for democracy in Sudan. Her writing has appeared in English, Korean, French, and Spanish translation. She has been a Writer-in-Residence at City of Asylum since 2019.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for brunch from 9:30 to 2 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.